by Rick Scott
Holy moly!
She phases into existence and finishes him off with two quick stabs to the kidneys.
Aiko defeats the Garrison Guard!
You gain 8000 experience points.
I stare, dumbfounded for a second, as does the second guard. But then I realize I’ve got to do something. Fast! I whack him over the head with the flat of my blade, the way I saw Diana do.
You hit the guard for 12 damage.
He cries out, both from the hit and the shock of seeing his comrade murdered in less than a second right in front of him. Then suddenly, he yells, “Alarm! Alarm!”
Aiko quickly stabs him in the throat, turning his shout into a gurgle, before she finishes him off with a series of lightning-quick strikes to his torso.
Aiko defeats the Garrison Guard!
You gain 8000 experience points.
“What the hell is wrong with you!” she snarls at me through the chat. “You just screwed everything up!”
Shouts and yells come from up above. I’ve really done it now. Crap, this thing with Braxus has me all messed up! I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore.
Aiko stoops down and grabs a ring of keys off the dead guard. “Better hope I’m fast enough for us to get back out of here alive. If anyone comes . . . you deal with it!”
She emphasizes it like it’s my problem alone. Aiko unlocks the door and disappears down a short flight of steps into the darkness of the dungeon. From above, I can hear more yells and footfalls. Soldiers coming.
My heart races, and my legs shake with adrenaline. I buff myself with Shadow Haste, Shadow Copy, and finally throw on Shadow Cloak. A full thirty seconds go by before three guards come running around the corner. They stop in their tracks and balk at their slain brethren, strewn across the floor.
“Sound the alarm!” one of them shouts. “Someone’s broken out of the dungeon!” The same one, then turns to the other two. “See who it was. I’ll seal the portcullis.”
Oh no!
“Aiko!” I yell in the chat. “We need to go, now!”
I press myself to the wall as the two guards rush down the stairs. Moral qualms or not, I’m going to have to do something. I move forward to stalk behind them, but muffled cries come from the darkness.
Aiko defeats the Garrison Guard!
You gain 8000 experience points.
Aiko defeats the Garrison Guard!
You gain 8000 experience points.
Aiko emerges, clad in her full Ninja gear. “Let’s go!”
She throws on Shadow Cloak and runs full tilt down the corridor. I struggle to keep pace with her as she zips past the onrushing guards, running up the sides of the walls to avoid them. I mimic her and am amazed when we’re both able to squeeze through. But we don’t go unnoticed.
“They’re cloaked!” someone yells. “Close the gate!”
Ugh. We’re in for it now.
The garrison becomes a hive of chaos. Screams and shouts resound off the walls. It’s only thanks to the fact that most of the soldiers are already outside that we’re able to make it back to the entrance without being hemmed in. But it’s too late. The portcullis is down, and there’s a squad of guards waiting both inside and out.
Not good. “Aiko! What are we going to do?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she becomes fully visible as she casts a spell, still on the run.
Aiko casts Shadow Step!
She flashes briefly with a purple hue, and the guards recoil in shock as the elf woman barrels straight into them. Aiko activates Charge Strike, and I expect to see her go crashing into the lead guard, but instead, she vanishes in a puff of purple-black smoke, and reappears on the other side of the portcullis, jabbing her katana into one of the guards outside.
Holy crap!
The solider releases a grunt of pain, stunned by the attack, losing a quarter of his health. Aiko then spins a quick 180 and uses Retreat, not flipping as normal, but vanishing again to reappear some distance away before she turns and runs full tilt toward the wall. It’s amazing to watch, but how am I supposed to get out?
“Aiko! I don’t have that spell!”
Her voice comes back over the party chat, melodic, mocking almost. “Oh well . . .”
What the heck? Did she just ditch me?
My insides freeze with panic, and then melt with the heated anger of betrayal. What am I going to do? The guards seem as bewildered as I am by what just happened. There are about a dozen of them, but there’s no way I can fight through them all. Suddenly, the one who seems to be the leader cries out: “Open the portcullis. Get after her!”
Wait, what? Holy cow! They don’t realize there are two of us!
I focus on hiding and stay out of their way as the gate slowly opens again, cranked up by a pair of guards on the inside. I wait until it’s fully open and watch as the guards pour out before I follow quickly behind them. My heart’s beating like a jackhammer as I rub shoulder-to-shoulder with them before peeling off and making a beeline for the wall.
I’ve never so felt so free and alive. Thank goodness, I’m out of that situation! I scan for Aiko and catch her already jumping off the top of the perimeter wall to the rooftops beyond. I chase after her, but take a wide arch over the adjacent roofs to intercept her when she eventually turns south toward the main city wall.
Cries from the guards reach the rooftops as they point and vainly shoot arrows at the fleeing elf, but eventually she casts Shadow Cloak and vanishes from sight. I keep an eye on where she is, though, and catch up to her as she makes her break toward the city wall.
“Hey!” I shout at her. “STOP!”
Remarkably, she does, becoming visible again. And then she fires back at me, sounding annoyed: “What?”
“What?” I echo sardonically. “You left me in there, Aiko! What’s wrong with you?”
She places her hands on her hips. “Please. I led them away from you. Besides, you got out okay, didn’t you?”
“You didn’t plan that!”
“So? Who cares if I did or didn’t? I should be more ticked at you for botching the whole job.”
I grind my teeth, but can’t really think of a good comeback to that. That’d be two things I’ve botched tonight. I better quit while I’m ahead. “So, are you finally ready to go now?”
She narrows her eyes. “Are you?”
I am not liking this chick. “Let’s go.”
As we start to head off, I notice that she’s going in the wrong direction. “Hey, you lost? The south wall is this way.”
“I’m not headed that way.”
“What?”
“I need to go east.”
“But we’re all headed west. We’re going to the Vale of Sorrows.” And then I add with a bit of vitriol, “To save your sister.”
Aiko comes to a halt, and I fear I just said something I shouldn’t have. She turns to me with daggers in her eyes. “What do you know about my sister?”
“Not much,” I say quickly, realizing I may have just triggered a far bigger nerve than I bargained for. “Just that she’s trapped in a labyrinth, and Val needs my help to tank the guardian to it.”
She huffs out a breath. “I’d be interested to know what else she’s told you.”
“If you come with me, you can find out for yourself.”
“Maybe. But like I said, I’ve got somewhere else to head to first.”
“What? Where?”
She gives me a smirk. “If you come with me, you can find out for yourself.”
She spins on her heel and takes off again in a run.
I sigh. Now I understand why Val considers her such a pain in the neck.
I dash after her, and when we reach the gigantic eastern wall, we leap onto it using Wall Run, sprinting vertically up its surface. I expect Aiko to stop at the top, but instead, she leaps off with a somersault, casting Shadow Copy in the process.
I hate to admit it, but it’s darn near the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I replicate her move,
jumping into the cold night air, flying unbound by gravity. As I cast Shadow Copy, I catch a glimpse of Stormwall in its entirety. Chaos reigns as the city devolves into turmoil, and my heart sinks, matching the gravity that takes hold of me again.
I’m sorry, Diana. I’ll be back to put this right.
Somehow.
As Aiko and I plummet back to the earth, we land with bone-shattering impact, losing our shadows, and then carry on running into the night.
Chapter 27: The Short Straw
“Bruce, you’re going to want to come see this.”
Bruce Peters stiffened and stared blankly at the sonar technician standing in the doorway to his office. When you were the man in charge, hearing those words could mean only one thing: problems. Just how big a problem usually depended on who it was uttering the doom-impending phrase, and coming from the sonar tech, Bruce’s stomach was already queasy with anxiety.
He managed to give the tech—Carl—a nod. “What’ve you got?”
Carl, a slim black man in his thirties, with close cut hair and a full beard, shook his head slowly. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Perfect. “All right. Show me.”
Leaving his office within the stasis observation lounge, Bruce followed Carl to the lift. There, he waited as they traveled down twenty levels to the lowest floor in Citadel. Bruce prepared himself as the elevator car slowed. This far down, the ambient heat was unbearable, made even more so by the energy converters that fed upon it. The elevator doors opened, and he was hit by a blast of oven-hot air. It had to be well over fifty degrees Celsius down here.
It was completely dark, too, save for the dull red glow that came from the energy converters that hummed below them. Set in an array that stretched across the half-kilometer-wide floor, the converters were each the size and shape of a small building, with massive cooling fins that made them resemble giant electrical transformers. The converters used cells that turned thermal heat directly into electrical energy at an efficiency rate of 80%. With the limitless heat this far below the Earth’s surface, their energy needs would always be met. So long as they had the nanites to keep the cells rejuvenated, of course.
Carl stepped out into the heat, clearly used to it, and clambered down the gangway that hung a couple of stories above the field of converter banks.
“Remember not to touch the rails,” Carl said as he headed toward a habitat box set up at the end of the gangway.
Bruce was thankful for the reminder and tucked his hands into his pockets for safekeeping. Touching bare metal in this place would likely leave a second-degree burn. The hab was only a few hundred meters from the elevator, but by the time they reached it, Bruce’s coveralls were soaked through with sweat.
A small airlock ushered in a blast of cool air as they entered, and then the inner door opened to allow them entrance into the RV-sized control station that housed the brains for the external detection equipment. Bruce went from sweating to freezing as the way-too-cold air chilled his damp clothes.
Carl took a seat at the command station in the center of the room and fired up the old holographic screens. As head of maintenance and engineering, Bruce knew the sonar system well. It was standalone, totally separate from the online servers that ran Crystal Shards Online, and was perhaps one of the oldest systems in existence, aside from the energy banks outside.
Their documentation on anything this old was sketchy, at best. Most of their records dated back to only three hundred years ago, to just after the Great Encounter, when the city was first attacked by a Builder. Even then, the details were sparse, and seemed to be more myth than fact; tales of giant monsters and heroes, no doubt embellished over time and muddled by the two decades of zero electronic records that followed, known to them now as the Dark Period. No one was certain what had caused that, either, but most historians speculated that an EMP-type device might have been used to defeat the Builder, destroying their prior history and anything else electronic in the process. If that were the case, then those twenty years of being sent back to the Stone Age must have been horrid. But even that was nothing more than speculation. The only thing they knew for certain was that over 70% of the population didn’t survive.
Following that, the sonar system was made standalone, so that if the AIs ever did hack into the main Shards, they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint their physical location and send another Builder their way. That was how the AIs had found them the first time—according to the records, at least. Housing the system in the depths of the city was another peculiar design choice that Bruce surmised might have had to do with the upper levels being breeched and contaminated, and the power room becoming the last bastion during the attack.
That was the nightmare scenario that had been passed on to him from his predecessor almost forty years ago. His entire career, Bruce had prayed that he wouldn’t be the one to finally draw the short straw and have a Builder show up on his watch.
But now, he feared the straw had already been drawn.
Bruce looked at the blue, three-dimensional imagery on the holo-screens. Citadel was portrayed as a vertical cylinder stretching over a kilometer long. All around it were root-like appendages that represented the various habitat levels. Further out, stretching as far as 500 kilometers, the space was dotted with small specks that resembled stars. Only someone as skilled as Carl could guess what those actually were, but anything denser than the existing bedrock would show up as a dot.
“So, what am I looking for?”
Carl touched a few holographic keys and 90% of the specks disappeared, leaving only a scattering at the far edges of the display. “These objects all moved about fifty meters in the last twenty-four hours.”
Bruce’s stomach fell through the floor. There had to be over a hundred of them. “Any idea what they are?”
Carl shook his head. “I’ve been doing this for over fifteen years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve seen things move before. Small things, but nothing this size. And never so many.”
“How big are they?”
“Big as a bus, maybe. Hard to tell with just the passive sonar, though. The only way we could to tell for sure would be to send an active ping, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Are they Builders?” Bruce asked.
Carl let out a nervous chuckle. “That’s what I was going to ask you. Smaller than what the history books say, but then again, we could be seeing the drills bits only.”
Dear lord. “And they’re making tunnels?”
“Again, too hard to tell without a ping, but I assume so.”
“What direction are they headed? Are they coming toward us?”
“So far, their headings seem random. I don’t have a lot of data yet, but if I were to liken it to anything, I’d say they’re behaving like ants in search of food. Just milling around.”
Bruce grimaced. “Do these movements correlate with the vibration readings we’ve been getting?”
Carl released a sigh. “I wish I could say yes, but no. That’s something else entirely. And still present. It’s getting stronger, too. If I were to venture a guess, these may be scouts, or drones . . . for whatever is making that vibration.”
Heaven help us . . . this is it. Bruce swallowed back the dry lump in his throat. “Who else have you told about this?”
“Just you.”
Bruce exhaled shakily. “Let’s keep it that way, for now. The last thing we need is another panic.” Or some other reason for Dennis to try to throw him under the bus. “Keep monitoring, and report your findings only to me. Understood?”
Carl nodded slowly. “Yes, sir.”
Bruce left the control center and reentered the heat of the power room, his thoughts running amuck. He’d have to disclose this to the rest of the board eventually, but not right now. On top of the nano crisis, this would simply be too much.
At least, that’s what Bruce told himself.
If he was completely honest, there was a far more selfish reason
for him not wanting to disclose it. Dennis had already canned his idea of sending out another broadcast signal for at least another month. But if Dennis knew about this, the software engineer would likely make the ban permanent.
And he couldn’t allow that to happen.
If this was to be the end, their final days, then there was no way he would be facing it without his family whole. Even if it summoned every Builder on the planet, he would send that signal out again and bring his daughter home.
He vowed it.
Bruce Peters would not die without seeing his little Gilly alive once more.
Chapter 28: Rookie
Morning breaks, and I’m dog tired.
Aiko and I ran for half the night through the forest, me mostly just trying to keep up with her as she navigated the pitch blackness with her elven night vision. Once certain we were far enough away from Stormwall, and not being followed, we bunked down in a small glade atop a hill and caught some sleep in the boughs of a willow tree.
That was about five hours ago. Now, the predawn sky has me stirring restlessly, my legs aching and back throbbing. I look across from me and am half surprised to see Aiko still sleeping soundly on the branch next to me. I watch the rise and fall of her chest as she snores gently. Her elven features are actually quite lovely when they’re not being marred by her abrasive personality. I still can’t believe I’m out here with her, heading who knows where, instead of meeting back up with Gilly and the others.
The thought brings a heaviness to my chest. Even more so, when I recall everything that transpired last night—the stuff with Braxus, the guards, Diana. It weighs me down to the point of despair. Things seemed so easy when all I was doing was trying to earn enough money to cure my mom. Defeat a World Boss. That was it.
Now, things are complicated, and messy, and I feel myself being pulled in so many directions at once. I need to help Val Helena save Becky. I need to help Diana save Stormwall. I need to help my brother save Citadel. And now I need to help Aiko do . . . who knows what?