Book 8 – Chapter 42 – Into darkness

“We’ve gathered all shells together, Lord Keith.” The knight said, giving a quick salute. “Lady To’Wrathh is carrying over the final shell. Portal has been confirmed disconnected from power, a clean cut that should be easy to repair when we are ready to leave.”

The moment we’d finished dealing with the Feathers, it had been a quick flurry of activity. We needed to move, and move fast. Getting them all fixed back up for possession, hunting down the last running one, and also finding a way to cut reinforcements from piling through the portal.

Because they had swarmed out of there like angry bees.

Relinquished knew we were here, left unsupervised in the same room as whatever weapon she’d sealed.

She’d probably expected the nine to hold anyone off for some time. Long enough to get reinforcements.

A few of these Feathers, if not all of them, had escaped through the Unity fractal. Which meant Relinquished was now well aware the nine she’d left behind here had been wiped out in under a minute.

So I expected her to do exactly what she did: Order anyone in the area to charge through the portal here and start the fight. And while that happened, she’d probably pull some deals with the mites and open that same portal up to her stronger Feathers. More than nine.

Which means we needed that portal controlled and sealed.

When the first machines sprinted through the portal to attack, we had already put a chokehold around it, rifles eating away anything passing out. A good twenty passed by, charging into gunfire and unbeatable blades.

They were buying time, while a knight traced back the power connections down to a few larger wires, and stabbed his blade through the ground down into them.

The portal cut off midway, slicing the last machine to come leaping through. A sort of insectlike multi-armed walking turret emplacement. Which was cut to pieces before it could fire anything at us.

“Scout maps from Lady To’Wrathh show the rest of this biome had the exits sealed.” The knight said. “We are alone here now.”

Her paranoia and chokepoint here had backfired. No way for Relinquished to get anyone to stop us in time.

“Good work.” I said, returning a quick salute as the knight turned back to help with the repairs on the stolen shells.

The machine network remained down, which meant no signals being sent to self-detonate these shells. By the time the original owners found out what were planning and got mad about it, we’d have modified all nine of these shells way out of their control scope.

I wasn’t certain if To’Avalis had revealed to everyone else that we were crazy enough to hijack Feather bodies for our own cause, or if he was trying to keep it under wraps. Whatever the case, these Feathers hadn’t even considered pulling the detonation switches when they’d evacuated.

That’s their problem. We’re Winterscars.

And the process started with removing all the unity fractals from each, rebuilding a brand new soul fractal for a knight to take command over.

Already some were starting to stand back up, slowly adjusting to their new body while Sagrius remained nearby, ready to recover the errant soul if it had a problem.

Nine more Feathers along with Father. That made ten immortal Feather shells manned by the best sorcerer knights in the world running around freely.

And unlike protofeathers, slicing their soul fractal would not end the fight. They’d be like father, simply jumping to the next reserve soul fractal they’d made.

Even if Relinquished beat down humanity, these ten were going to be a thorn in her side for a very very long time.

But that left me with another problem the goddess had put down in front of us: The cube.

I tapped the miteseeker with a soul tendril, coming to ask my favorite locksmith for some advice.

It’s going to be a little anticlimactic here Prime, but I don’t need to pick any locks for this one. We just need to work with what we’ve got right here.

Wait, it’s already opened?

No, Superior gave a wry smile back. I mean we already have the key, we need to find where the lock is and unlock it there.

There’s only one thing I could think of as a potential key. The miteseeker? I pulled it off my belt, looking it over. How’s this the key?

That’s the part I have no idea about. The seeker here was made as a bargain. Part of that bargain is to let the user know they already have the key, and they let me know only after I asked directly. Would make the bargain cheaper to not include how to operate the key. Tsuya probably took a gamble that knowing we have it is already enough to get us to hunt for the rest.

I could see the logic. It would be a poor idea to lead an expedition team all the way here, only to leave them with no way to open the cube after.

The cube itself looked like a dark cathedral. Made of the same type of material a mite blast doorway would be. There were geometric patterns in glowing gold, the same kind I remembered seeing on the orb that Atius had recovered.

But Journey quickly outlined a possible entryway. One of the geometric patterns wasn’t just glowing lights, but rather a depression and separation. A set of hexagonal shapes, connected together a little chaotically, but the material edges weren’t perfectly flush to the cube itself. Like they’d been slotted inwards.

But for all our scanning, we found nothing. No sign of opening it.

Wrath flew above it, looking for anything on the upper edges, but I did realize there was one section of the cube we hadn’t scanned.

The cube was just too big for the bridge here to support that amount of metal, unless the mites had embedded more of their occult ratshit within it.

This cube looked like it had been dropped onto the bridge here, and barely held together by it. But what if it was the other way around? The bridge was built under or through the cube, and then lifted it upwards?

In which case the real support under the cube didn’t come from the bridge, but instead from all those hexagonal pillars under?

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Wrath, check under the bridge. We might find more info there.”

She did, taking a loop, and flying directly down into the hexagonal forest under the bridge. Her camera feed showed up on my HUD, scanning.

And I’d been right on the money. A few hundred differently sized hexagonal pillars had sprouted upwards, carrying the cube with all of them.

The lower edge of the cube stuck out under the bridge, and Wrath flew over to investigate, landing on an empty pillar, looking up at the underside of the cube.

There, at the very bottom, just five feet upwards from the lower edge, right to the height a human would slot a key, was a depression.

“Suprised it’s not a riddle or some kind of trap.” I said, looking over the feed. “Knock on metal.”

The knights all around me all tapped their chest three times in the middle of their work.

“Size and depth of this depression seems to match with the dimensions of your miteseeker perfectly.” Wrath said, running the calculations. “I assume we will need to slot the mitespeaker through here?”

“Looks that way to me, worth a try. Come pick me up?” I asked, already walking over to the edge of the bridge.