book 8 – Chapter 59 – The Knight

“So this plan could work?”

She hadn’t said it wouldn’t work, just that it required modification.

She straightened her blue cap, then met my eyes. “I believe with my modified viral payload from Abdication, along with my own processing power amplifying it, I will be able to break through the encryptions and firewalls Relinquished will have brought out.”

“So, what’s the but?”

“… but there is an unknown factor: The Acasual. Or, as you know it – the occult. There are many programs out there that lack the processing power I have, and yet have been able to run circles around me and even defeat my own systems by abusing acasual means.”

Ah. She meant A22.

And I could tell the Icon knew I’d already come up with that answer, given her nod. “Yes. Exactly who I was thinking of. Despite all her skill and ability in the acasual sphere of influence, she was defeated by Relinquished.”

“We can’t be certain of that,” I said. Although deep inside my gut, I also knew the chances of A22 having survived against Relinquished were low. Abraxas and she had gone out on their own terms.

The Icon gave me a sad smile, which told me she could take a probability guess, but the numbers were less than favorable. “What Miss Aztu taught me was the power of the Occult and how it can be wielded to fend off larger programs and escape. And her disappearance against Relinquished teaches me one last lesson,” she turned her gaze to the window showing the ocean beyond. “To survive out there, one cannot only rely on the occult. Nor only rely on hardware. I require both.”

“And you only have the hardware right now. Scrap.”

I got what she was saying. She could break the encryption and firewalls, but we had no idea if that was all that Relinquished was using to guard the territory. Given how important Tsuya’s old network was, Relinquished wouldn’t just call it a day with standard digital protection. She’d be using occult defenses among it too, which the Icon wasn’t equipped to fight off.

“You have golden era hardware running on your physical body. Can you accelerate your learning of the occult and power?”

She shook her head. “No. Training with the occult and developing the abilities require true experience, by the very nature of the occult itself. It cannot be a simple software patch or physical upgrade. At best, it seems I may be able to borrow someone else’s power.”

Her eyes went to Conviction’s blade in my hand.

If I had more time, I’d be diving into this ancient relic and studying every fractal that was inside. I could tell they were interconnected with one another, building on each other, like gears all perfectly polished, spinning in harmony.

I held it up in the room, watching the concepts within hum with power. I could add onto it, imbue it with the lessons I’d learned from Aztu, add in knowledge of my occult and memories of my training with Hexis within the blade, so that anyone who held it could tap into that too.

But it wouldn’t be any different than reading a book – someone else’s words left behind. Understanding the memories and writing was up to the individual.

She’d have asked me for the blade directly if this had been a solution. I realized that for all the charge and might within this relic, even for the short amount of time I’d held onto it, the blade itself was slowly fading in power. The will and strength within this blade weren’t the blade’s; they were Conviction’s.

That’s why it wasn’t going to be a solution to all this. It would certainly up the Icon’s chances, and the might she could wield with a blade like this in her hands was likely high. But she wasn’t a fighter herself. “I see,” I said, putting the blade back down slowly. “You’re not a warrior.”

“Correct. I do not have the experience fighting off the kinds of enemies you face regularly, Mr. Winterscar.”

“And failure in this case means having Relinquished discover you exist.” I started to pace in her office, back and forth, thinking it through. “She’d probably drop absolutely everything in the world to come snuff you out as fast as she could.”

And if the Icon is killed, that’s one less heavy piece on humanity’s side, if not the actual king piece we had to use. The gods-damned chess game Relinquished played against me kept coming back up in my mind over and over. We had a small army on our end.

Wrath. Father. Sagrius. Urs.

Queen. Rook. Bishop. And king.

The pawns on her end were the entire machine empire, while ours happened to be scattered churches and clans.

The Icon was functionally our hidden extra queen. A pawn piece that would slowly sneak to the other end of the board, hiding in plain sight, and turn into the most dangerous piece if she wasn’t spotted deep behind the enemy lines.

She could only reveal herself as a player once she was already in position on the other side of the board, and prepared in the same manner that Tsuya was.

She just needed a knight piece to be at her side and escort her there.

“All right. Options,” I said, brainstorming what we could do, well aware that any plan we came up with here had to work the first time. There wouldn’t be a second time. “You said it would take seven years before you have the occult training to fight off Relinquished?”

“If her processing power and ability shut down or froze in some manner, it would take me six years instead. As I grow in power, I have to assume she will continue her own power scaling that follows her prior pattern. If I assume she is completely asleep and unable to notice larger movement patterns in the digital sea such as my own rise in power, it would only take me three years to catch up. The majority of the additional time to my estimate is in keeping hidden from her sight.”

“Well, don’t think that’s a good direction to go down anyway,” I said. “The only reason she’d fall asleep is if all of humanity everywhere were eradicated for good, with no chance of being restored that she knows of. So we’d all be scrapped already. Let’s put that down as a good plan B. If you aren’t able to learn the occult in time to fight her off, then we need someone who already has that training or ability.”

She raised a finger. “The only entity that I know of which could fight against Relinquished and hold her off would be the mite faction. However…”

“Yeah, they don’t function that way. They’re a balancing force; if they stick their nose in against Relinquished, they’re almost obligated by their weird nature to put the same amount of effort the other direction, which would probably squash us. Or demand an equal payment, which would be above anything we could pay.” I stopped pacing, realizing something. “Maybe we’re on the right track, though. If we can’t get a singular entity to help shore up your defense against the occult, maybe we could get an entire faction? Is there something like that in the digital sea out there? There are millions of programs and regions I remember.”

I had an encounter with one such program myself, a massive titan that had an entire ecosystem of its own floating around it; that’s how massive the thing was. But for all that program’s power, it remained afraid of Relinquished. Maybe it had friends?

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“No,” the Icon shook her head. “There are no factions with enough unity to fight against Relinquished.”

“Really? After all these centuries, there isn’t a single other group of programs that banded together?”

“No. It is worse: there aren’t even enough factions so that all of them bound together could pose a threat. You have logs among your video footage of training with an occultist named Hexis, yes? I see a history of the occult teachings here, which included the fate of all institutions that gathered too much centralized power. In the same way, Relinquished has done this to the digital sea, and with far greater ease given this is her direct domain.”

I remembered Relinquished had entire bot networks scouting the oceans everywhere, to the point they were just a natural part of the ocean out here. Just getting a single one to show up on my bait had been absurdly easy, come to think of it.

She had eyes everywhere in the sea for a reason.