Upon reaching the corner of the room, Ethan stopped and listened carefully for a moment. That done, he unleashed a flurry of hacks and slashes upon the wall. His energy blade sizzled as it cut right through it. Ethan then threw himself at the center of the area he’d been cutting. His armor-enhanced leg strength allowed him to bash right through it, and he burst back into the hallway. Peering through the bits of drywall and steel flying around him, Ethan spotted the robot. He was right behind it.
The robot’s turret spun to target him as he landed on the ground, but Ethan hit it with a powerful aether blast. The blow was too weak to damage it at all, but the force hit the turret and stalled its movement for a second. That was all the time Ethan needed to catch his balance and leap at the robot. As he came down atop it, his energy blade slashed through steel, severing one of the machine gun barrels in half.
The robot jerked hard as it tried to reverse and knock Ethan loose, but he grabbed its turret with one hand and sliced its other machine gun off with the sword in his other hand. Ethan then steadied himself and used both hands to drive his energy blade straight down through the gap in the robot’s armor that lay between its body and its turret. There was a loud hiss, and sparks flew as the blade sank deep into the machine. It then stopped moving and powered down as its lights went out.
Once he withdrew his blade, Ethan stepped off the destroyed robot. However, before he could relax, two government enforcers burst out of the smoke that filled the corridor in front of him. The smoke was from Ethan’s own grenade, and the two agents were the ones who had attacked him from behind before.
A few bullets ricocheted off Ethan’s armor before he managed to raise his energy shield, but then a barrage of aether blasts slammed into the enforcers. They were thrown back off their feet and hit the wall hard. Both the men dropped their weapons, so Ethan destroyed them with another blast of evoking.
“All right, let’s see what’s in here,” Ethan said as he turned away from the disarmed agents and walked toward the steel door that his map told him led to the server room.
CHAPTER 41
UNCHAINED
The steel door was locked, but a few slashes of his energy sword and a strong kick was all it took to knock it over. It landed with a loud clang and then Ethan walked over it and into the room on the other side. It wasn’t the server room. It looked like a small decontamination room of some sort, so Ethan simply barged through it and into the real server room beyond it.
His destination was a large chamber about two hundred feet across. The painted walls and the floor tiles were bright white and incredibly clean looking. Servers filled almost all the space, so Ethan was pretty sure he was in the right place. The big rectangular machines were as tall as people and covered in blinking lights and wires. Most of them also had a small touch screen on their side for easy access.
However, before Ethan could complete his mission, he had to deal with one problem. He wasn’t alone. There were five other people in the room. Two men and three women. All of them were wearing white lab coats, so they were probably scientists. One of them was armed with a pistol, which he was pointing at Ethan.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” the skinny scientist with the pistol shouted as he brandished his weapon.
Ethan just stared at the man. “I just went through like a hundred heavily armed soldiers and a blew up a small tank to get here. Your little gun isn’t going to hurt me. Drop the weapon and get out of here, or I’ll remove you by force, which you won’t enjoy. Trust me.”
The scientist with the pistol hesitated, but his companions didn’t. They immediately broke for the door behind Ethan. This caused their armed friend to hesitate some more, but then he dropped his weapon and fled after them.
“Smart move!” Ethan yelled at their backs.
None of them replied, and a few moments later, Ethan was alone in the server room with only the whine of the cooling fans for company. That meant there was nothing between Ethan and his goals now. Smiling in satisfaction, Ethan walked to the nearest server and plugged his flash device into it. That done, he summoned the demon AI. There was no point flailing around himself. There was no way he’d be able to sort through all the information in these servers with his own undeveloped abilities.
“Wow, it’s like an entire universe in here,” the demon remarked in an awe-filled tone as it came online. “So much data that even I’m humbled by it, and such rich design. This is part of the source code of Worldshift and much more. I see hints of the presence of far greater AIs than myself here, builders of worlds with incalculable power.”
“I’m sure it’s very impressive, but we have work to do. I need to find out as much about Lily as possible before the government shows back up,” Ethan told the slave AI.
“You really should come in here and see this for yourself. It’s so beautiful.”
“Can you find the information I need or not?”
“Oh, I already have. It was easy. She left you a message in case you ever tried this,” the demon replied smugly.
Ethan sighed as he received a data dump from the demon. Of course she had.
Steeling himself, Ethan opened the video file within the data, and it played across his vision. He felt a painful shock when Lily’s face appeared, even though he’d been expecting it.
“Hello, Ethan,” Lily said. She was dressed in casual clothes. Her blonde hair was messy, and there was a sad smile on her face. “I thought you might go looking for me, and I didn’t want you to struggle in vain, so I left you this message. Please stop.”
Ethan felt anger rise in his chest. He glared at the image of the woman before him. What right did she have to tell him what to do? Hadn’t she done that enough?
“I don’t need your help, and you don’t need me, not anymore,” Lily stated. “You’ve ascended, and now the entire world lies at your feet. You’re something new. Something great. The world needs that right now more than ever. You can help deal with the chaos that will soon engulf everything. You can be a real leader and help shepherd humanity to a better future. I know you can.”
Lily looked down as if she were feeling guilty. “That’s why I joined your party. Due to some special circumstances, I ended up working with Tekko. My mission was to look for people with a strong will and the qualities of a leader. Tekko simply wanted as many ascended as possible, but I knew there would soon be a desperate need for ascended with good hearts, so I set out to find them and guide them up the tower.”
“Why me?” Ethan asked no one in particular.
“You were my best find,” Lily said as she looked up and smiled sadly again, almost as if she’d heard him. “You were so full of doubt, but your heart was in the right place, and you had all the qualities of a great leader. I knew a little push would allow you to become your best self. All you needed was a reason to master your will so that you could ascend.”
A cold numbness seeped into Ethan. So she had been manipulating him into ascending after all. Michael had been right.
Ethan looked up as Lily’s voice became more passionate and pleading. “So please, Ethan, go be the great man I know you can be. Save the world. You’ve always wanted to be needed, and now you are. Forget about me. I’m sorry for not explaining any of this to you before, but it was necessary. You won’t see me again. I have my own reasons for staying in the tower. Goodbye.”
The video ended and the screen closed, but Ethan stared into empty space for several long moments. He didn’t know what to think.
“Um, are you still conscious?” the demon asked. “Was there a virus in there? Because if not, you really shouldn’t be standing around and wasting time like a dumb meat bag.”
“Thanks for your concern,” Ethan told the demon sarcastically and shook himself to clear his head. “It means a lot to me.”
“Well, I am stuck in your head, so I definitely don’t want anything to happen to it.”
“Right, I’m not happy about that either, but let’s focus on the present. Can you find any
more information on Lily?” Ethan asked. He still had questions that hadn’t been answered. Why would Lily stay in the tower? She seemed to be an ascended herself, so why leave everything to him?
“You were dumped. Get over it,” the demon replied. “Honestly, you should seriously consider listening to her and doing the whole world-conquest thing. Together, I think we could really nail that.”
“I don’t think that’s what Lily was getting at,” Ethan replied dryly.
“Meh, saving the world requires imposing your will on it, which is definitely a form of conquest.”
“Get me that information on Lily,” Ethan commanded the demon coldly.
The demon sighed. “Fine, one second.”
“All right, I found some new data,” the demon said exactly a second later. “Here you go.”
This time, the AI sent Ethan hundreds of documents and files. Ethan grimaced as he studied their filenames. Most of them were coded and looked only tangentially related to Lily.
“All right, we should leave. Get out of there. I can look these over later,” he told his invisible helper.
“You need to work on your reading speed. That should take you a few milliseconds,” the demon muttered before withdrawing back into his implant.
Ethan felt lost and bitter. He didn’t know what he was planning to do in the grand scheme of things, but he didn’t really feel like obeying anything Lily told him right now. Thankfully, he could focus on escaping this building and worry about long-term plans later.
Turning away from the servers, Ethan headed out of the room and back into the hallway. No one attacked him, so he went past the rubble and the fallen robot until he came to the edge of the building. There, huge windows covered the entire exterior wall, and Ethan could see the city stretch out before him. He was about a dozen floors up, and there were many taller buildings off in the distance, but he could still see a lot. Ethan took in the sights for a second. Below him, the city looked normal, despite the violence seething through it. Sunlight reflected off glass as distant cars sped along the streets. It looked like any other day.
Only when Ethan looked straight down at the parking lot was the chaos obvious. It didn’t look like government reinforcements had arrived yet. There was a bit of movement between the totaled vehicles but nothing major. Good, that would make escaping easier.
Ethan was feeling reckless and angry, so he decided to do something stupid. Taking out his blade, he cut a hole in the reinforced glass of the window and then jumped out. He’d always wanted to do this in the real world.
Over a hundred feet up, momentum allowed Ethan to hover in the air for a moment as broken shards of glass fell around him. Then he fell toward the distant ground with increasing speed. The shining glass of the building he’d just jumped out of zipped past behind him.
As the wind whipped past, Ethan let himself enjoy the sensation of freedom and the exhilaration of danger for a few moments. It felt like all his burdens were suddenly lifted from his shoulders, but it couldn’t last. The ground was getting closer.
Sighing, Ethan spun around and activated his hookshot. There was an explosive hiss when his grappling hook shot out of his wrist device and slammed into the side of the building. As the line went taught, Ethan twisted around to swing to his left, which absorbed some of the shock when he lost momentum.
Suddenly, a symbol flashed in the corner of Ethan’s vision. He instantly recognized it as the incoming alarm. Ethan grabbed the wall so that he came to a stop. Then, he jerked around and looked for the source of the alarm. His visual interface pointed him right toward it. There was a missile zooming toward him on his left.
A jolt of fear went through Ethan, but he held his panic at bay as time slowed. His interface was already calculating the time until impact, and he had almost five seconds. Assuming it was guided, dodging this missile would require perfect timing, so Ethan didn’t want to move too soon.
The front of the missile grew larger in Ethan’s vision as it shot toward him. The timer hit two seconds until impact. Only then did he move. Detaching his line, Ethan kicked off the wall so that he shot downward headfirst. The wind whipped around his helmet as he dove and then the missile hit the side of the building behind him. An explosion rocked the air, and bits of debris shot past Ethan as he was buffeted by the blast wave. It took a bit of flailing around for Ethan to smooth his fall, but once he stopped tumbling through the air, he flipped around and hit the wall behind him with another hook. Then, he slammed his feet into the glass.
Sparks flew off Ethan’s boots as they ground against the glass, and his hookshot’s reel whirred as it released more cable, but Ethan’s descent slowed. Once he was descending in a controlled way again, Ethan looked over his shoulder to study the sky for more incoming fire. He didn’t see any, but he did find the source of the missile. Off in the distance, there was a helicopterlike drone zooming toward him. The machine was the size of a large person, and clearly of military design. Its blades whirled through the air as it flew, and it had two short stubby wings with weapons hanging below them. The bureau was apparently done holding back. They were bringing out the heavy military hardware now.
As Ethan studied this new threat, it fired two more missiles his way.
“Buggy loops,” Ethan cursed as he watched them shoot toward him. They seemed to be flying on different trajectories, likely as part of an anti-evasion firing solution. It meant Ethan was going to have to be creative if he wanted to dodge them.
It looked like the second missile was coming in below and behind the first, so as the first missile zoomed in, Ethan threw himself sideways and swung away on his line. The missile detonated behind him. There was an ear-splitting bang followed by a storm of broken glass and a blast wave that threw Ethan sideways. This time he was hanging from a secure line though, so he swung along instead of falling.
Of course, there was still the second missile to deal with. It had locked onto Ethan, predicted his path, and was about to hit him.
Ethan let himself swing for another half second, so that he was beginning to swing upward, then he let go of his line. Instantly, glass windows zipped by as he was hurled up and away. Ethan grinned as the missile flew through the space he’d been occupying a moment ago and slammed into the building, where it detonated explosively.
Reaching out, Ethan shot a hook at one of the windows he was flying past. He then used his line to bring himself to a sudden stop so that he was hanging on the side of the building again. His support drone zoomed down to hover beside him. It had been following him at a safe distance as he descended the side of the building.
Ethan looked at the attacking aircraft. It hadn’t fired its last missile, but it was still zooming in toward him. The military drone looked to have a machine gun, so it was probably planning on getting closer so it could use that.
“Not a chance,” Ethan announced as he reached for the quiver on his back and drew a javelin from it.
The drone noticed his action and opened fire with its heavy gun. Ethan simply commanded his support drone to activate its energy shield. That stopped the incoming bullets and he was able to focus on his throw. Securely attached to the side of the building, he whipped a spear at his attacker. It was a little awkward, but evoking did most the work anyway.
As the crystal spear zoomed toward it, the military drone dodged left and avoided it. However, Ethan was already throwing another javelin. This one zipped toward the military drone even quicker than the last, catching it off guard. Thus, the second crystal spear hit the military drone and sliced through its armor. The weapon sank into the machine, disabling it and sending it falling. A few moments later, there was a loud crash when it hit the ground.
Since there were no more enemies flying around, Ethan used his reel to control his descent down the side of the building. Hopping and sliding, he reached the ground in under thirty seconds.
As Ethan jumped onto the pavement at the base of the building, a few scattered shots flew toward him from out in the
parking lot, but none of them even hit his armor. The few remaining government enforcers hiding among the totaled cars weren’t a threat. Ethan ignored them and ran toward the street. It was time to go.
No one tried to confront Ethan as he dashed through the vans and cars he’d knocked over on his way in, although he did get shot at a few more times. Thus, he was quickly able to exit the parking lot and step out onto the sidewalk next to the street. Most of the crowds from earlier had disappeared, although there were still a few people hanging around in doorways or peering out windows. They’d probably been dispersed by the police. There were also no cars going down the road anymore. The police must have cordoned the street off.
As Ethan crossed the street, he heard the screech of a siren, which quickly grew louder. Stopping in place, he glanced down the road just in time to see several police cars and vans appear. They raced toward Ethan with their blue lights flashing and their sirens wailing. Above them flew a swarm of surveillance drones, bobbing in the air like a flock of mechanical birds. This could be a problem.
Reaching for the Origin, Ethan began to pour energy into a shimmering orb of force.
The cars slowed as they approached. Ethan frowned as he watched them from the middle of the road, then he directed his support drone to take up a defensive position in front of him. It would be easier to escape if he disabled these new arrivals and their drones now. Leaving them behind would be a mistake. Besides, it was time to show the bureau and all their lackeys that the game had changed. They couldn’t bully and control everything anymore.
“Drop your weapons, remove your helmet, and get on the ground. Comply or we will open fire!” a masculine voice yelled from a speaker on the lead car as the convoy finally came to a halt about thirty feet from Ethan.
Worldshift- Virtual Revolution Page 48