Chapter 365: RTS Mode |
[What do you mean ‘she’s going to help out?’]
“Look, do we really have time to debate this?” I pulled off my helm and ran a hand through my hair. “There’s only 30 minutes until the Labyrinth collapses in on itself or whatever it’s going to do.”
[This woman isn’t a System entity of any kind. Furthermore,she is a member of the enemy faction who we met literally minutes ago.You are asking me to allow this woman to manipulate Labyrinth conditions, and you want to bypass the entire discussion of how grossly irresponsible that is because we do not have time?]
“Yeah, pretty much.”
Grotto’s feelers twitched. [This is absurd! Why would she even agree to assist us?]
“If it helps,” Savant began, not that she’d ever stopped, “I don’t really have any attachment to the United as a group, I just agreed to come here because it sounded like something fun to do and while the world is endlessly fascinating I’m always eager to see new parts of it, so they sent me here with a puzzle to solve which is to say the Labyrinth itself was the puzzle, and I did enjoy it but now that I’ve solved it I have no reason not to un-solve it if that makes sense.”
Grotto looked at her for a long moment. [No! It does not make sense!]
“Well it doesn’t really matter what you think about it, I guess I can just go and start doing what the Xor’Drel entity–”
“Call me Arlo, please.”
Grotto and I both looked over to Shog who was cleaning, oiling, and sharpening his many blades. He glanced over at us.
“Slayer has decided she is deserving of our protection, so I will protect her.”
Savant gestured at Shog and mumbled, “I’m glad I have this person’s support but they are very scary so I’m going to pretend they don’t exist while I work.” And with that, she tried to sit up on her stretcher, grunted, and failed. “I can’t stand up so I’m going to need some assistance. That failed attempt was mostly performative to encourage you to help me.” She added the second sentence more quietly, although it was easily audible to all of us.
I floated the stretcher over to her workstation, then used the plates of Gracorvus to fashion what had to be the world’s most uncomfortable wheelchair. Of course, it was really a hover chair so its cool factor made up for the lack of padding. I followed to help move Savant into it with her permission, ignored several uncomfortable, increasingly scandalous remarks about how she’d always fantasized about a man in armor sweeping her off her feet, then gave her some space to work.
She lifted her remaining arm, looked over to where the left one was missing, then down at her snacks. She wore a conflicted look as she mumbled, “I can no longer do both at once so now I have to prioritize.” Eventually she opted to throw a handful of snacks into her mouth before getting to it.
[We will discuss this at length when the crisis is resolved,] Grotto thought to me with a scowl. He floated grumpily towards Savant. [I should at least oversee what she is doing. Who knows how she could make things even worse?] The little octo then literally hovered over the woman’s shoulder while she was doing her thing.
“You can access all eight stations from any of the stations so long as you go through the main obelisk and somebody installed a physical device that could avoid lots of the defenses these people had set up. It was really well hidden but there were lots of little signs of its presence so I didn’t have much trouble locating it, and Salibar had to turn liquid to get to where it was but he was immune to all the safeguards which involved lightning and poison and some other things but it isn’t important.
“Anyway, I activated it, meaning I received something called ‘higher-tier administrator access’ and now I can sneak into the other stations by following this series of glowy squares of text. I don’t really know the names of lots of these things so my explanation probably isn’t very technical.”
[You used a physical override to backdoor into the other user profiles. I suppose the System Architect was the mistrustful sort.]
Savant flew through text on the slates, manipulating them with one hand at a speed that would have been impressive with four. Then again the second hand was possibly used exclusively for snacking so this wasn’t much different from her normal output.
With those thoughts I left the pair alone and went over to examine Etja. From the sounds of things I had a few minutes, and since I could access Grotto’s Golemancy skill, I was hoping I could do something about her comatose state.
She was still wearing the gear that Grotto had equipped her with, allowing him to move her through the Heavy Armor Dungeon. I removed her helmet, and the mess it had made of her hair had somehow made her look even more endearing. That emotion was immediately followed by a stab of anger at Orexis for stealing her autonomy like this.
I pushed that down and got to work removing her gorget. I gently rolled her over to reach a common location for control runes on the back of her neck. My first instinct was to look for seams or other signs of an access panel, but Etja was too human for that kind of thing. Fortunately, I’d been witness to her creation and had glimpsed the way Orexis’s soul had mingled with mana to create the woman’s internal mana structure. Combined with what I knew of Etja’s soul, there were only a couple of places that formed the kind of nexus where I’d expect the runes to appear.
It was an odd sensation having Grotto’s memories mix with my own to give me those kinds of insights, but I let them guide me. I came to conclusions that felt obvious in hindsight, but which I knew I could never have reached a few weeks beforehand.
I pulled a thin blade from my inventory, a scalpel I’d made for Nuralie when she was crafting items for soul surgery. This would be closer to a standard form of surgery, although because of Etja’s nature it was also like sculpture or even engineering. I gave myself only a few seconds to hesitate and make sure what I was about to do was necessary, but I needed to see the runes under the surface. There was no easy way to access them, so I sighed, put the scalpel to Etja’s flesh, and started carving.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The woman didn’t bleed–she couldn’t–and it was a mercifully clean process peeling back her skin and artificial muscle to expose a plate grafted to the column that served as her spine. I looked closely at the runes, realizing they were a script I didn’t recognize.
“Fuck,” I said under my breath, continuing to stare down at them, trying to will them to makes sense. This was a totally different weaving paradigm than what I was used to, the letters harsh and blocky instead of neat and precise. In fact, as I leaned in and squinted, I could see that the runes were three-dimensional. That wasn’t unheard of in weaving, but it made things exponentially more complex.
I tugged at my beard and looked back at Grotto and Savant. If there were any Golemancy knowledge that would help I’d be able to access it without consulting the Core, but it was possible he could identify this language through knowledge that he hadn’t used in the practice of that skill.
“The interesting thing I’m seeing here through this big group of, uh, stuff here–”
[The database.]
“–is that the System never takes the power it grants back unless a person agrees and even then there has to be an exchange using rules that are big and complex, but the point is that it looks like the System has records of every ability it gives out and to whom it was granted, allowing it to create countermeasures to all of the Delvers on the planet. So this whole psychic interference web thingy–”
[Network.]
“–is actually six different countermeasures being deployed in overlap because psychic abilities actually come from six different disciplines–at least, there are six different disciplines I’ve found–and when you look at the details in the thingy–”
[In the file.]
“–you can see the System stole these from somebody else and built on it. Most of the magic in this ‘database’ wasn’t System-designed at all but most of the countermeasures are so it’s pretty simple to just remove this block of commands and undo it.”
“Earworm: Contact attempt number, uh, we’re somewhere in the one thousand range. I lost count, but I’m not letting that stop me! Is anybody from Tavio Company out there? Can anybody from Tavio Company hear me? I repeat, Earworm is listening with psychic ears open. I’m here to hear if you catch my drift.”
“Arlo: Earworm, we’re picking up what you’re putting down. Have you spoken with Lieutenant Nokomi?”
“Earworm: Yes I have, Your Majesty. After you sent her our way she came right for me, and after that she bolted for the forest at full speed.”
“Arlo: All right, good. Grotto is going to make contact using the pass phrase I gave her. Please add him to the network and he can play command and conquer to get all your people out of here.”
“Earworm: Go ahead, Champ.” There were a few seconds of psychic silence before Earworm came back. “Whoa, King! I am not a fan. I don’t wanna be impolite but… this isn’t a person.”
[GROTTO: This is why I did not wish to be a part of this network in the first place. Not only would hearing the continual blather of mediocre Delvers be an irritant for my mind, my presence would have naturally eroded your control over this shoddy network.]
“Earworm: … How did you get your callsign to be so loud and ominous? That’s not exactly what I just assigned to you!”
[GROTTO: And yet you still know it is me, for I am the mind and the will. Directing the activities of hordes of my lessers is what I was built to do so be silent and allow me to address the incompetence of your soldiers.]
“Earworm: Well fuck you too, my guy! Network’s yours to use to abuse.”
The conversation had taken place on a private line, so to speak, but now Grotto began blasting out to everyone in the company, including Folly and Ishi’s party, Two of Crowns.
[GROTTO: Attention, Lords, Ladies, and all you other filthy rabble. Today, you find yourselves equals, for you are all equally blessed to have fallen under my administration. There are approximately 21 minutes before the Labyrinth and surrounding areas will move from being less-than-habitable to lethally uninhabitable. Should you wish to live, you will follow my directions precisely. Should you refuse, then your stupidity shall be your final blunder, for it will have doomed you to an agonizing death.]
“Tavio: King Xor’Drel, I am glad to see that you’ve reestablished the network, but perhaps you could ask your familiar to be less inflammatory with his directions?”
“Arlo: And I’m glad to see that you’re alive, Tavio. Sadly, I don’t control my familiar’s behavior and accept no accountability for his actions.”
“Tavio: But he is your familiar…”
[GROTTO: Silence! Every moment your prattle wastes reduces your chances of survival.] Grotto allowed a few seconds for anyone else to challenge his vocabulary, then went on. [Good. Now, Lieutenant Colonel Tavio, I see that you are in the Piercing Weapons Dungeon. I will require you and those with you to proceed to the Colossal Weapons Dungeon for extraction.]
“Madel: Why would the Colossal Weapons Dungeon serve as an extraction point? Is that where Arlo went?”
[GROTTO: Do not ask questions! Colonel Tavio, you will provide me with a comprehensive list of the intrinsic skills possessed by your party and then follow the prescribed route given to you.]
Tavio complied, and Savant worked with Grotto to establish the safest way for everyone to make it where we needed them to go. In the meantime I reconnected with my favorite Chovali. The number of Chovali I knew personally wouldn’t make for a very long list, but she was absolutely dominating the top spot.
“Arlo: Lieutenant, I’m glad you figured out my hints.”
“Nokomi: To be honest, King Xor’Drel, your hints are not very subtle.”
“Arlo: Yeah, I’m not built for the cloak and dagger stuff. I’m more focused on the exact opposite, really.”
“Nokomi: From what I know of you, I would have to agree. I presume you are contacting me because it is time to begin channeling my Gate spell? I have made it as close as I can get to the Colossal Weapons Dungeon. I cannot proceed any further without entering the Labyrinth itself.”
“Arlo: Yes, go ahead. I was worried the entire forest had gotten wrapped up in this thing, and I don’t have a great Plan C for extracting everyone. Also, see what you can do to supercharge your portal. The distance you’re going still takes a pretty long channel from where you are and we don’t have a lot of time.”
“Nokomi: You are not the only portal specialist, Your Majesty. I have earned some upgrades since Krimsim.”
“Arlo: That’s good. You’ve got ten minutes.”
“Nokomi: Ah, that is not very much time. Okay, I think I can do that if I just… I have the mana so long as I don’t need to make the portal selective.”
“Arlo: Should be fine. The avatars running around in here are after my people, not yours.”
“Nokomi: Avatars?!”
“Arlo: Stay focused on the portal and try not to worry about it. Arlo out!”
While I had my speed-of-thought convo with Nokomi, I had my second focus listening to Savant’s constant play-by-play. “I think that this second Littan party is probably going to die unless we send someone because that’s a lot of monsters and they all look infected with something which is Charl and he’s trying to infect the Littans too and I think those wands are going to run out of charges soon. I don’t really like Charl. He uses his fanaticism to justify being a jerk and I don’t think he is a very well adjusted person.”
“Hmmm,” Shog purred, suddenly looming over the young Geulon woman. She went very still in his presence. “I am not of much use here. Perhaps if you guide me to them I can be of service by slaughtering their foes.”
“Sure thing!” she squeaked, then started laying out a route for the c’thon.