Malware: A Cultivation Academy Series (Bastion Academy Book 2)

by J D Astra

  Just as I had observed the movement of Tae-do’s body and learned his skills, so too had I discovered his motives for behavior. They weren’t separate bits of information, but pieces of a whole.

  Ko-nah stepped out of the back room, a large brown paper package under his right arm. He passed the curly-haired Dragon with a nod of familiarity. The Dragon returned the gesture, perhaps not in friendliness, but a lower stature of respect. Strange. Ko-nah had said the older brothers mostly ignored him. Perhaps this one was the outlier. They both seemed to have a dislike of Tae-do; maybe that brought them together.

  “Let’s get going.” Ko-nah gestured for us to go first through the door to the exit.

  “Wait.” The baritone voice of wansil Wong called after us, and I stopped, looking over my shoulder. He pointed at me as he crossed the arena floor, and my palms tingled with worry. Why was he pointing at me?

  He stood before me, hands on his hips. “The scar on your head. You’re Jiyong Law, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, wansil Wong,” I said with a shallow yet respectful bow.

  He smirked. “You beat my youngest son by cheating.”

  “I wouldn’t say I cheated, since the duel had not begun.”

  “Technicality,” he said, his lip twitching.

  In a flash, I remembered we were deep in aristocrat territory, and no one knew. Wong could easily have all four of us disposed of and none would be the wiser. Yuri would be hunted down, and maybe Hana, but Cho and I would fade into the noise of all the other goings-on in the kingdom.

  I bowed deeper. “Perhaps I was more determined to survive than he was to destroy me.”

  Wong barked a deep laugh. “That’s my youngest son! No grit.”

  The group of older students in the arena chuckled maliciously. Wansil Wong shooed at us, and I bowed again. “Thank you for the demonstration.”

  “It wasn’t for you,” he replied with an air of arrogance.

  At that, I decided it was time to leave—with haste.

  Chapter 29

  WANSIL Wong refused to pay for our rickshaws back to Bastion, and all I could afford was to get back to the festival. It was a convenient excuse for us to lose Ko-nah, who didn’t want to ride public transport—faster or no—back to school. I nodded to Ko-nah and told him I understood, though I didn’t, since it gave the four of us an opportunity to discuss what in Mun-de-Jayu just happened.

  The thirty-minute train ride from the festival back to Bastion was enough time to divulge the rest of the information I had learned over the last few days to the crew, like the underwater structure that Mae couldn’t infiltrate and the effects of Dragon’s Blood. We cast a sound dampening bubble around ourselves and augmented it with the illusion of conversation, mirroring and mimicking the chatter around us.

  To anyone not paying attention, we would sound like everyone else on the train. The sungchal would notice, so we had to cancel our spells and return to idle chatter about our gifts whenever they patrolled.

  Hana leaned in, shaking her head. “I can’t believe this, but I think Ko-nah’s been manipulating us with ry persuasion. I mean, I’m good—really good—but he convinced me to withhold Shin-soo’s accusation with only a few words and hand motions. I think he’s operating on a whole different level of ry persuasion.”

  “What was the accusation?” Yuri prodded.

  Hana grimaced. “The weird thing is, I still don’t want to talk about it. When I think about what Shin-soo said, I get sick to my stomach.” She paused, swallowing hard before continuing, “Shin-soo said he was collaborating with one of the Jade Fire students to steal something from Bastion for his family. He couldn’t say what—it literally pained him to divulge what he did—and so that was all I got.”

  I nodded. “Ko-nah was ‘admiring’ one of the female Jade Fire students the day they arrived. But he seemed genuinely interested in her beauty.” I scowled as I thought back to the way he smiled when he talked about her. “Maybe that package is some aid to steal whatever it is they’re after?”

  “But what could they be after at a school?” Cho asked, his brow furrowed.

  Hana shrugged. “Min-hwan has a lot of powerful machina and weapons in his office, and some of the other instructors do, too.”

  “No matter what they’re here to steal, we know one thing for sure. Ko-nah and the package are suspect. Hana, do you think you can corner Shin-soo and get more out of him?”

  She nodded. “It might take a while, but I’m on it. We need to keep Shin-soo close enough to Tae-do and Ko-nah to give us the details we need, so I’ll have to be careful about how I approach him.”

  “Good. Next, wansil Wong is a real threat beyond our combined skill level. We need to involve a trusted adult of similar skill, and I think I have just the one. I’ve told Woong-ji everything so far. I think we can trust her.”

  “Agreed. She seems pretty awesome, and I love her hair,” Yuri affirmed with a serious expression, as if loving her hair was proof of her trustworthiness.

  “We still need to investigate the signal,” Mae reminded us.

  I sighed. There was so much to do. “I need to train up my range connection with Tuko. We can’t risk trying to enter the dojang ourselves. It’s too far, too well protected, and it would be much too easy for wansil Wong to dump our bodies into the bay to be feasted on by giant, carnivorous Gilded Dragonets.”

  “They’re so pretty!” Yuri’s eyes sparkled for a second, and then her expression sank. “But I don’t want to be eaten by one...”

  “Same,” Hana said with disappointment. I think she hungered for those late-night excursions and back-alley fist fights for justice, like she was some heroic vigilante. Well, she already was, in honesty. She’d saved my skin on a few occasions.

  Cho bobbed his head. “It’s decided. Tuko will go and hopefully not become fish food.”

  Tuko, with a greater reservoir, better conservation, and some careful planning would be able to find out what was in that secret room behind the shrine. My money was on the entrance to the underwater structure.

  We made it back to Bastion as dinner was starting. We ate with Il-sung, cheerfully discussing our purchases and the interesting things we saw at the festival while withholding the trip to the Wongs’ dojang. Il-sung had been intimidated by Tae-do before, and the less he knew the better it would be for him and us.

  When we finished, I went to the lodge to stash my family’s gifts. Ko-nah was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling when I came in.

  “You missed dinner,” I mentioned to break the awkward silence.

  Ko-nah didn’t move or look my way as he said, “I wasn’t hungry.”

  I turned to him with a hundred thoughts fighting to burst through my mouth. I wanted to confront him about the package and get to the bottom of this, but something told me that wasn’t how Ko-nah operated. Honesty hadn’t served him in the past, and no matter what I said, he wouldn’t believe it could serve him now.

  I wasn’t certain I wanted to know the answer, anyway. If Ko-nah was the one bringing the drugs into the school for his stepfather, who was broadcasting the signal, then what would I do? I’d been trying to teach and mold Ko-nah all year, and thought I was making progress. But today, it seemed like Ko-nah’s old self of complaints and disdain was alive and well.

  “What is it?” Ko-nah asked with annoyance.

  I calmed my breathing. “I was wondering if you were alright. You seemed upset today.”

  He scoffed. “Since when do you really care?”

  I wanted to defend myself. I did care. This wasn’t just about discovering who was behind the drugs or keeping Tae-do out of my real business. I had genuinely invested my time and effort into helping Ko-nah become greater.

  There was nothing I could say that would serve my defense, nothing that would assuage his troubled mind. He was in a dark place of compassionless solitude, like Tae-do.

  I dropped my head as I left the room. There were still things that needed to get done tonight, and I coul
dn’t let Ko-nah’s feelings get in the way of the truth. I carved my way around the students gathered at the main pagoda’s festival display—another thing I had missed last year.

  The fifth-year students had transplanted one of the massive pines from the glade to the front entrance. The dirt around the base was still freshly turned from where the soil had been tilled to allow the tree a stable structure. What an amazing feat!

  Students of every skill level had cast their best ry glimmers to decorate it with shimmering light, and others had used their en skills to craft hollow glass ornaments that reflected the spells’ light.

  I took a moment to admire it, and Mae sighed. “I think we had one of these in lab one year.” The image of a tree—only a meter tall—with solid roots that looked more like plastic came to mind. It had blinking devices all over it, pinecones frosted with white paint, and a golden star at the top.

  ‘Is that one of your memories?’ I asked as I tried to recall the image again, but couldn’t.

  “Did you see that?” she asked, surprised.

  ‘I saw something.’

  “Interesting...” Mae said with wonder. “I don’t want to push the limitations of our relationship, but it may be possible for me to teach you information by transference. Think of it like this transplanted tree, except I would copy the data into your head instead of moving my knowledge into your brain.”

  ‘Maybe when we’re not in school. We have enough to be learning right now,’ I thought and she agreed.

  I made my way through the gathered students and up to Woong-ji’s workshop. Unsurprisingly, she was working on her massive project. She didn’t greet me as I came in, but let me get to work for a moment on some of the test projects for the first-year students. The duels needed broken devices for fixing, and it was my duty as Woong-ji’s apprentice to provide them at varying skill levels. I liked the work. It was mind clearing, and I got paid. Not to mention, the act of purposefully breaking a device lent powerful insights into fixing them.

  After a good half hour of that, Woong-ji stopped for a break. She brought water in for us to share, and we sat discussing her work. She talked through one of the problems she predicted early on in the design that was coming to fruition now as she was trying to weld the pieces together.

  “The leg joints require a lot of overlapping metal to allow for a full range of motion, but this causes problems with the weld stability. I’m not seeing a good way around it,” she said with a sigh. She sipped her water, and I stepped up to her schematics.

  Indeed, the knee joint required a great deal more overlapping metal to be hidden inside the thigh plating so when she bent her knee to walk, the inner workings of the leg wouldn’t be exposed. It was a tricky spot.

  “What about fish scales?” I asked. I had Gilded Dragonets on the mind. “Fish are quite flexible, and their scales slide over one another easily while protecting their tender skin.”

  “Scales,” she said with a thoughtful hum.

  I sent silvery ry to my fingertip as I sketched over her plans. “You could link them, like chain mail. It’s not as secure as a solid plate, and it leaves room for the opponent to infiltrate with their own munje, but would give you significantly more range of motion without sacrificing too much protection.”

  I stepped back and allowed her to inspect my sketches. She hummed again, this time with more interest. “Yes, I think this might work nicely. Thank you.”

  I nodded and moved back to my stool to sit. Working on machina problems always cleared my head, but the woes of our future weighed heavily on my mind. How could I broach this topic with her?

  “Are you feeling all right?” she asked.

  I smirked, remembering she could very likely hear my thoughts as I had them. “I am, but I need to talk about something.”

  She pulled up a chair and sat back. “Fill me in on the adventures of Jiyong.”

  We discussed the details of my outings, everything my friends and I had discovered at the Wongs, the package Ko-nah had received, and our plans to infiltrate the dojang. After another half hour of that, exhaustion weighed on me.

  “I need to improve my range to investigate, and wanted to see if you could help,” I finished.

  She nodded, a worried expression wrinkling the space between her brows. “Jiyong, remember when I said you took on a lot this year? This is too much. You’re just a young man going to school! It’s in your best interest to bring this to Min-hwan and to forget about it.”

  I recalled how Min-hwan had bent to the power of the Wongs when he wouldn’t expel Tae-do. He couldn’t be trusted to do something about this or to do enough. We needed to root out the signal, its purpose, put an end to it as well as the drugs running rampant, and reverse whatever damage had been done.

  I shook my head. “It may be in my best interest, but it’s not the right course of action.”

  Woong-ji breathed in deep and sighed. She closed her eyes and dropped her head for a moment, then looked up at me with sympathy. “As your master, it’s my duty to protect you. If you’re ever in real danger, I will take over this situation and do what I feel is appropriate to remove you and any other student from harm’s way. And last, I must tell Min-hwan about the Wong family and drug accusation.”

  I cleared my throat nervously, worried for the punishment I might receive for speaking back. “Master, if you tell Min-hwan and he does not handle it delicately, it could upset my plans. I would prefer if you could wait to reveal this to the Grandmaster, so that I won’t be implicated, and so the Wongs will not have time to move their operation elsewhere. Catching Ko-nah with a few vials of the substance on campus will end his career at Bastion, but not end the threat.”

  Woong-ji hummed pensively. “You’re very right, Jiyong. I will wait until after you execute your next infiltration. However, I saw Ko-nah entering the school this evening with a package he was trying to hide in a glimmer strapped to his back. My accusation would be enough for Min-hwan to investigate—I thought perhaps it was some harmless contraband—but I will wait. That Ko-nah, he is a skilled ry user,” she said with a sigh, as if she was disappointed in him.

  I recalled how when he spoke to Hana alone, he’d so easily changed her mind about what Shin-soo had said and got an apology out of her. He had hidden himself almost in plain sight against the wall when he was looking at the exchange student and camouflaged himself as a very convincing rock at the beginning of the year. He was skilled and dangerous in his own right.

  She pointed a finger in the air, then went on, “What I will do, however, is alert Min-hwan that there may be a plot to steal our artifacts. We will lock them down, similar to how the alchemy lab and other classes are locked. They will be quite secure.

  “As for increasing your range, you’ll need to expand Tuko’s reservoir again—though he’s already quite big. What else do you have in there?” Woong-ji asked as she approached the bench where Tuko sat.

  I talked over his specs, revealed his hidden compartments with smoke bombs, en-electric needles that would discharge on contact, and a few other shot modifications that were non-lethal.

  “What about this?” Woong-ji asked, pointing to the large empty space on the underbelly.

  “That’s for me,” Mae said aloud.

  Woong-ji quirked a brow and looked at me for an explanation. I didn’t have one.

  Mae went on, “I have to go on the next journey, in the spare device. I can maintain a connection through your munje. I can store a lot more data this way, capture detailed still images for evidence, and connect to any machines in the area that are from my era.”

  I scowled, but then the motive made more sense. “You think the other bit of you is there, don’t you?”

  Mae sighed. “Yes. I’m ninety-eight-percent certain that the other version of me is broadcasting the signal. It’s complex and modular, written in a language that only someone like me could understand. A human could do this, but would need a lot of operational machines from my era to do so—hence the two
percent uncertainty.”

  Woong-ji hummed. “What will you do if the other version of you detects your presence?”

  “I think I’ve got an idea for that,” I said with a smirk.

  Chapter 30

  “THIS IS THE CRAZIEST, smartest stupid plan ever,” Mae said, her voice strained with worry as I paddled Tuko’s many legs through the water.

  With Woong-ji’s help, we had crafted a buoyant outer shell with wide, paddle legs that Tuko’s spidery limbs would slip into. It had taken me a week to get paddling down to a science, but now that I had it, Tuko was even faster on the water than on land. With the extra speed and expediency for getting to the dojang, we didn’t need additional reservoir space.

  We picked a moonless night, which took an additional week that we used to prepare by expanding the secondary device and reviewing all the visual information Mae had collected. She created a three-dimensional ry projection of the dojang and what she was able to detect of the underwater facility. We knew exactly where we were going, how much time we had to be there based on the trial runs, and how fast I used up the ma munje, and we had studied alternate escape routes relentlessly.

  Hana and I had cast the best ry reflection glimmer we could on Tuko and the Tu-boat, and hoped it would be enough to avoid the piercing gazes of patrolling sungchal. We left the mostly invisible package tucked away in a dark corner near the docks closest to Bastion, and when night fell, I got to work.

  Mae gave a proximity blare in my head, and I ceased paddling, pulling all the limbs out of the water. I mobilized a tiny bit of ry in the reservoir to silence the water lapping against the Tu-boat shell, then kept as still as possible. I breathed deeply to keep calm and maintain my connection as the two-meter-long shadow swam under us. It circled once, and I swallowed, ready to unleash the electric needle at a moment’s notice.

  The creature moved on, and I gave a huge sigh of relief, then paddled again a little faster. The dojang came into view along the coast, and my palms prickled with fear. This was going to work. We had prepared in every way possible. Everything was going to be fine.