All we could see of the room beyond the small antechamber filled with iron cages was a pair of blood-red eyes shining in the darkness. The rest was hidden by a thick steel door. Elyra's [Navigational Ping,] however, gave us more information.
The room was littered with strange things the skill had issues recognizing, all of them marked as potential points of interest that we should investigate, and there were two sources of magic.
One was staring right at us. The other? No time to think about it right now.
The monster leaped, shattering the illusion of calm before the storm and breaking the stare-off. It launched itself straight at us, snarling and hissing, the sound accompanied by the clacking of limbs and carapace sections. It aimed for the door, coming into the light and revealing its thick carapace and many teeth.
A skitterpede, the largest one we had ever seen.
When it reached the door, it slammed it open with sheer strength and struggled to squeeze inside it. I gripped my shield, raising it higher. The monster struggled, bending and twisting its body to squeeze through the door. I could see the coiling of its powerful muscles underneath, ready to launch itself at us as soon as it was through.
It moved, writhed and hissed.
"It's stuck," Vespera said after several long seconds. "Hahaha! SPACER BOY, THE MONSTER IS STUCK!"
She roared with laughter, walking forward with her darkness claws fully extended: boiling, rippling appendages of darkness and red streaks that hid a wicked edge that could rend flesh and bone with ease.
"Vespera!" Elyra hissed, but the demon simply flooded the bond with confidence and walked forward.
When she reached the door, we all thought she was about to cut into the stuck monster with her claws. Instead, she picked up one of the rusted bars from the floor and poked the creature with it.
"These things really are stupid, aren't they?" she said, giggling. "Hehe, you aren't getting through, big boy."
She poked it again, making Elyra wince. "Stop being a troublemaker, Vespera. What if it gets free?"
The demon cooed, blinking at the monster while making big puppy eyes. "Oh, she thinks you can break free. You won't do that, will you? Be a good monster and STAY STILL!"
She yelled the last two words, and her claws grew to double their original length. With a savage double swipe, she cut the monster open, splitting flesh, bone and chitin apart with ease. The creature hissed and writhed in pain and rage, but she struck again and again. Now the monster was trying to retreat, but she wasn't going to let it.
"Sol," she said casually.
I let go of my shield, and in its place appeared the huge demonic scale sword—the other weapon of the [Triumvirate's Armory]. I charged forward, impaling the monster with enough strength to finally dislodge it from the door, raising it above my head and slamming it on the ground. Before it could react, I reversed the grip on my sword and effortlessly bisected it.
You have defeated a level 78 [Skitterpede].
"Stupid and weak," the demon said smugly.
Elyra, who had been ready to cast a shield as soon as things went south, finally relaxed. "Really?" she asked, deadpan.
"Yep," the demon said with a disarming smile. "See the door frame? It didn't even dent."
"I suppose you are right," the angel said.
Neither she nor I could be mad at Vespera for too long. Not when we felt what she felt. She had needed to vent some frustration, and what better way to do that than a monster that got stuck in a door entirely on its own? It was the perfect occasion.
"Level seventy-eight, though," I said. "They really are weak for their level."
I examined its body in search of a core, and finally found it. An advantage to bisecting creatures was that it made it rather easy to find their cores, as long as they were near the axis of symmetry. Elyra shook her head at my random thoughts, while Vespera stood amused but also very excited about the contents of the room. Another ping revealed that the other source of magic had not moved at all from where it had been the first time, seemingly content with watching us kill the skitterpede without interfering.
Now it was time to see what secrets the room was hiding.
I summoned the shield again right as my precious little angel—she was also a very patient angel, putting up with us all the time—increased the brightness of her halo and wings. The light flooded the room, revealing…
"What is this stuff?" Vespera cried out in surprise.
Meanwhile, my jaw dropped. I was looking at some of the last things I would ever expect to see in a fantasy world filled with monsters, sentient trees, magic, angels and demons. Computers. Wires. Keyboards. They littered the walls and even the floor. Rusted piles of random electronic stuff, none of which made any sense to me. I recognized their general shape, but there were things about them that were slightly wrong. They hurt my modern sensibilities.
"Of course they do," Vespera said, blowing dust off of a dead cathode-tube screen. "This stuff's a pile of garbage!"
She and Elyra, having read my memories during the many times we shared minds, were as familiar with the technology in the room as I was. They even manifested themselves as little spaceships accompanying my hauler whenever we shared minds together.
"Not garbage," the angel said. She was busy meticulously examining and cataloguing everything, touching the screens and poking the various implements. They all looked dead, but the room was awash with the static buzz of electricity. Maybe the interfaces were switched off?
"Then what?" the demon asked. "This stuff looks ancient! But, like, wrong ancient. Don't you agree, Sol?"
I hummed while following both her and Elyra's train of thought. Finally, I managed to pinpoint what had been bothering me. "This is not ancient tech from my world. It might look like it at first glance, but… look at those tubes running along the wall. Those screens aren't attached to anything. That over there looks like an oversized vacuum valve, but it's floating. No, this—"
I tried to follow the cables and wires on the wall especially. They all seemed to converge towards the far wall, where shadows hid the source of magic Elyra's ping had found.
"Wait," the angel called all of a sudden. The bond was flooded with the command to stay silent, and we obeyed it without question. "Can you hear that?" she asked in a whisper.
Skittering. Movement. Deep inside the tunnel we came from.
"Fire off a ping," Vespera told her telepathically.
Mana was expended, the mental flip of a switch. Three minds parsed the data independently and we all gasped simultaneously. There were skitterpedes down the tunnel. Not one, not a dozen. Hundreds.
My eyes went to the door. Vespera's claws appeared in a sudden flurry of magic. Elyra's halo glowed, her eyes trained on the flickering light of the crystals in the antechamber, barely visible through the door.
"I say we fight them," the demon said. She knew I was looking at the door, thinking about sealing ourselves in. Reading my thoughts, she shook her head. "We don't want to get stuck inside."
I nodded, switching from the shield to the sword. I was the first to walk outside, right when the tide of monsters came around the bend of the tunnel and we got our first good view of them. It was like looking at the beast tide, a never-ending blanket of limbs and carapaces.
I waited. Elyra's shields appeared and began to funnel the skitterpedes towards the center of the tunnel.
When the first monster arrived, I sliced with an upward swing of the sword. It was surprisingly easy. The demon scales of its edge cut into its flesh and bone, and the monster fell in two chunks to either side of me.
I didn't have time to admire the ease with which a weightless sword coupled with ninety Strength had dispatched the monster, though. I dismissed the System message and attacked again.
Before long, I was swinging the sword in wide arcs without technique or finesse. Each time I did, I mowed down several skitterpedes, which fell by the side in increasingly tall mounds of dead and twitching monster flesh. The shields Elyra was summoning were holding, although they were getting pummeled and the angel was beginning to struggle. I kept an eye on our shared mana pool, watching it tick down.
A random swing that went too wide led to a discovery that changed the tide of the battle. My sword passed through her shields as if they weren't there. Just the tip, it had been a mistake, but now the game was on. I retreated, and Elyra snapped the shield close, creating a sort of wedge where the monsters got stuck. Vespera gingerly approached the wall of monsters and tried with her claws. They too passed straight through.
We spent the following minute or so methodically destroying and dismantling everything on the other side of the shield. The shimmering wall of light plugged the tunnel shut, and the growing piles of dead monsters were forcing the still alive skitterpedes to push them out of the way first.
It was a slaughter.
"We must have killed hundreds!" Vespera cried out. "Where are our levels?? Stupid System!"
"Forget about levels," I said with a grunt. "I'm more worried about the fact that they never seem to end! I can't even see the tunnel behind them."
She looked up and saw that the monsters had piled up almost as high as the ceiling. Grinning, she said: "more free experience, cmon!"
We fought. The shield glowed, its geometrical lines and intricate circles flaring with each impact.
"I can't keep this up for much longer," Elyra groaned. A beam of light from her halo obliterated a monster that was attacking the shield while hanging from the ceiling, making it fall on the others below and buying a moment of respite for a single section of shield.
Then three more climbed to the ceiling and attacked. She chugged a mana potion and lasered them all, but more came. Vespera and I kept attacking. The demon's claws hit dead monsters more often than they did alive ones. It had been a while since she last made a joke, or even spoke at all for that matter.
My sword had a bigger reach than her claws, and it could cut through anything I managed to overpower with my Strength, which included mountains of dead monsters pressed into a paste by the frenzied horde behind. However, the pressure only made things worse. It was much more effective at putting a strain on Elyra's shield than even direct attacks.
Soon one section flickered and monsters spilled through. It was only a fraction of a second before the angel managed to get the shield back online, but it was enough. The creatures flooded like a tide, and Vespera moved to intercept them before they could reach our immobile caster. She killed them all with ease, but not without suffering our very first wounds.
After a few rounds of this, even I was beginning to feel the fatigue of the siege.
"We need to retreat," I told the bloodied demon. She snarled, plunging her claws into the shield and turning a skitterpede into mincemeat.
Despite the adrenaline and rage, her movements were sloppy and slow, as if her arms were twice as heavy as normal. She was getting tired, fast.
Another monster attacked her from behind, slipping through the shield above and crawling on the ceiling, but she had seen it coming through Elyra's eyes. Her tail shot out, coated in clouds of darkness and red energy, impaling the monster and then cutting through its flesh like a chainsaw. It came out gripping its glowing core, which the demon tossed into a huge scattered pile we had made in the room beyond the steel door.
"Yep. I guess it's time to fall back, spacer boy," she said.
I swung my sword again, making more room on the other side of the shield. Some of the skitterpedes were digging through the corpses of their kindred, searching for cores. When they found them, they'd crush them with their mandibles and glow for a moment.
Vespera grimaced. "You do know that if we seal ourselves behind the door, we won't be able to leave the way we came, right?"
"We aren't leaving through here regardless," I said.
"Just making sure you understand the consequences," she said chipperly. I knew it was fake. After attacking one last time, she vaulted back towards the door. She put her arms around the angel, who stiffened but let herself be manhandled by the demon, then nodded towards me. "Whenever you are ready."
The moment she moved Elyra, the shields were going to come down. It was another thing we discovered in this fight. Her shields were a lot stronger if she didn't move, but this also meant that right now, her being immobile was the only thing that prevented the skitterpedes from flooding in.
Even that had its limits.
I cut through another monster that had managed to phase through the shield when it flickered, then moved away towards them.
"Go," I said.
Vespera grabbed the other girl and together, they threw themselves through the door. The shield vanished, and the monsters spilled in. I walked backwards, swinging the sword like crazy, fighting to get to the door in time before the monsters made moving it impossible. It was mounted so that it would open outwards, which was perfect because the pressure of the monsters would keep it from opening, but it also meant that if they got to it before I could close it, then not even my Strength was going to get it to move.
Switching from sword to shield, I batted the monsters away, and managed to buy myself a small second before the tide closed in again. I pulled with all my strength. The door was thick, and its rusty hinges refused to move. Still, something gave up because all of a sudden the door moved, slamming shut right in my face and sending me sprawling on my butt, right next to the girls.
I was panting, feeling the buzz of the fight, adrenaline and the electricity in the room all around us.
Class level up!
[Bound to the Fallen] Level 4 → 5
+30 Vit, +25 Str
+1 Class skill point.
I looked at the girls. The girls looked at me. We were all battered, bruised and generally hurting. Vespera was bleeding from at least two rather nasty wounds and a collection of scratches. Elyra was bleeding from her nose. I was also in bad shape, but my Vitality meant that all the cuts were already healing up. I too had taken a deeper hit; an impaling claw clipped my shoulder, but the dull throb of torn muscles was not the true reason we were all staring at the door.
The monster cores. The small fortune in cores we managed to salvage from the skitterpedes. We had thrown them all haphazardly through the door while fighting, so they should be here on the floor.
"Where the heavens did they go?" Vespera shrieked with rising frustration. "Did they evaporate or some shit? I swear today is not a good day for the System to pull some random prank on—"
Floodlights above us suddenly switched on, light ten times stronger than Elyra's soft glow stunning us like a flashbang. Through the blindness we heard a deafening cacophony of noises coming from all around. Beeps, whirrs of machines, bubbling of fluids inside vats and tubes.
A nasty siren blared twice, then died. All sounds died. All that remained was a single soft beep.
My eyes adjusted first, and the girls all stared through them as I looked around.
Beep. Beep.
Elyra gasped, head snapping to the far wall. "H-has that been here all along?"
The shadows concealing it were gone, revealing a huge core, bound by thick chains. The room was devoid of computers or equipment. Instead, the core took up almost all the space. It towered at least two meters tall. It was massive, looming with power and weight.
"I didn't think they could get that large," I muttered in astonishment. "What sort of creature—"
Wait. It took a moment to parse the sensations coming from Vespera, but when I did…
The core was chock-full of demonic energy!
The chains formed a lock that glowed with magic, disappearing into the concrete of the wall. There, a complex magical diagram had been carved in the wall, and it too glowed with sinister blues and violets.
Tubes coming out of the wall entered the core from behind, where we couldn't see.
An unspoken question came from the girls. I couldn't blame them. They knew my memories, but my experience of it had always been unpleasant and therefore, they didn't pry too much. Thing was, I knew full well what the fluid I could see in the transparent tubes was.
It glowed a sickly yellow-green. It was thick and syrupy, with bubbles of gases coming from the demon core slowly working their way up the tubes. But, most important of all, it had a metallic sheen.
Nanites.
The tubes going into the core were full of Green.
Yes. Green. The Green, the one with a capital G. I guess it had more uses than just to keep a human young and healthy.
◈◈◈
Status: Sol Nightguard
General Level 6
[Bound to the Fallen] Level 5
Str: 115
Dex: 15
Vit: 145
Int: 15
Wis: 15
General Skills:
[Matter Reclamation] 3
[Heavy Load Bearing] 2
[Navigational Ping] 2
Class Skills:
[Resonance Castling] 1
[Paradoxical Mending] 1
[Triumvirate's Armory] 1
[Aspect Manifestation] 1
[Rejection of Fate] 1