At best, this was a secret side project, that even most of the New Human Empire didn’t know about. If it had succeeded, the war would have been won in an instant. Even with it failing, the only demerit is that they lose their spies. But, they also lose the need to spend as much gold as they likely had to for this to work every month. Furthermore, there will undoubtedly be chaos among the races until all of the diplomats are returned to normal.
My only consolation was that it was highly unlikely for them to have a second base like this. Even before my grove started devouring itself, I wouldn’t have been able to make enough gold to sustain half of the system entities they had bought here, so I can’t imagine them having too many more. I could only offer a silent thanks to Malthan for sending us here, regardless of what happens in the future.
Aww, shucks. You’re going to make me cry, you know? Real, manly tears.
You know what? I take it back. I shook my head, working with the others to gather up the remaining people below, before having them all sent to the ship. And… of course, getting Maeve some clothes. Thankfully, she seemed more accepting about being naked than the reason why she was naked in the first place.
Chapter 30: Scum of the Earth
For the next several days of the journey, Thalia worked with Maeve to fix the public chaos sowed by the doppelgangers. At first, as expected, they came together to denounce both Thalia and Maeve. However, we also had the Qu’Lopti and the Deus Ex on our side, who had not been infiltrated. With their support, public opinion began turning in our favor.
Even though the doppelgangers still denied the claims, and threatened all-out war if this continued, the people had to admit that things were suspicious. Finally, a fight broke out among some of the halflings, resulting in one of the doppelganger guards being killed. Immediately afterwards, that person woke up aboard the Ariadne, and sent a call to his friends and family.
From there, it was only a matter of time. The doppelgangers for the various political leaders went into hiding, and began using what influence they had left to disrupt things such as the economy or military powers. However, they had no more allies left, now that proof of the scheme had been confirmed.
One by one, people began waking up aboard the ship, all of them shocked by the events that had happened. It would be hard for anyone to accept what they had done, and a few even tried to take their own lives, before the crew stepped in to stop them. Those who had fallen too deep into their depression were sedated, so that they could be with their families to recover.
By the time we were back at Gerin, almost all of the doppelgangers had been found and killed. Which is good, because we had no way to reverse the situation from our end. Even after Celeste spent days studying the connection, she could not think of any way to safely sever it without first killing the double. According to her, this was truly the work of the system, and she had even confirmed the item on the market.
Infiltration Clone
During purchase, please designate a target for the clone to mimic. Once the clone and the original meet, the clone will steal the soul of the original, gaining all of their knowledge and memories. However, they will remain loyal to the one who purchased them. In order to keep the soul intact, and allow the clone to access the system as if it were the original, the original must be kept alive at all times. If the original dies, the clone will die within 24 hours.
Cost: 1,000 gold x original’s level per month.
I was shocked when I saw that item, having a hard time accepting that even such a thing was available. Though, the price was not that cheap, it was hardly expensive. However, once you start adding up how many people they had to copy, they must have spent millions of gold on this plan. And, that is ignoring the costs they invested into things such as the system entities for the base, the ships defending it, and the space cannon aimed at the planet.
Speaking of which, there was that commander that was trapped in the Toy Prison. About a day after we left, Celeste and Yin accompanied me to the brig, where I opened the Toy Prison to release him. For the time when he was trapped, he was almost constantly banging against the spatial walls holding him, which gave me the meanest migraine you could ever imagine. Try to picture someone literally punching the inside of your skull, and that’s about how it felt.
Once he was released, he immediately turned towards me. A vicious grin was on his face as his hand shifted, metal parts sliding around to form a cannon. As he lifted his arm up to aim it at me, his entire hand had been ripped off by Yin, who looked at him with eyes that were begging for an excuse to do the same thing to his head.
“The fuck!?” He shouted out, looking at the broken stub of a wrist on his metal arm. “Do you guys even know who I am?!”
“One big headache.” I said, gripping my head slightly. Opening the Toy Prison to release him hadn’t done my brain any favors. Though, at least now I knew that I was able to use this power if needed.
“You idiot, I’m going to--” His words were suddenly turned into a mumbled mess when his mouth locked itself closed, causing his eyes to go wide in alarm. Yin’s glare was becoming more intense by the moment.
“Shut up.” She commanded, and I could see sparks dancing on her arms, knowing that she was barely holding back from killing this man. I couldn’t tell if her rage was directed at him personally, or at the New Human Empire, which he represented. Either way, making her mad right now would be unhealthy for anyone.
Letting out a sigh, I turned to Celeste. “Would you mind?” Celeste nodded, and opened the barred door to the cell that the prisoner was in. At the same time, his body lifted into the air and slammed against the wall, refusing to move even a muscle as the Deus Ex approached.
This was the real reason that we brought him out in the brig, rather than ejecting him out the airlock. He was the first real source of information that we had access to, and we needed to get everything we could out of him. Normally, this would be done through a friendly interrogation, maybe use a few torture techniques.
Right now, though, nobody on this ship, Celeste included, wanted to keep him alive. So, our ‘interrogation’ involved searching his soul for memories related to the enemy. However, something came up after a few moments, causing Celeste to raise her artificial eyebrows. Her lips slightly twisted into a derisive smirk as she called out to me. “John, could you summon something up for us? Something nasty, preferably.”
“Uhm… why?”
“He’s a doppelganger.” She explained, causing the man’s eyes to widen further. “His soul has the same kind of connection that the others had, except his body is on the receiving end. So… while we’re playing with his soul, why not send them a little present when we’re done?”
“You mean..?” I gulped slightly, imagining the implications to what she was saying.
“I mean, I want to replace his soul with that of a monster, and have that be what gets sent back when he dies. See how they like it when their soldier starts rampaging in whatever base he is held in.” There was venom in her words, and I got the feeling that Yin wasn’t the only one that was holding the New Human Empire accountable for what they had been trying to do.
I hesitated for a moment, not wanting to admit that the idea had merit. Maybe it was the old morals talking, but twisting souls around like this just didn’t sit well. Though, that hesitation lasted for only the few seconds it took me to accept that we had originally come here to rip out his soul and look through it like the pages of a book.
Reluctantly, I agreed, and created a spell circle in the prison. The creature it was configured to summon was an ettin, something I had made far too many times in the past. I doubted that I could forget how to do this even if I wanted to.
Celeste, seeing the preparations were done, poured mana into the circle, creating the two-headed giant. Then, she promptly killed it. Finally, she aimed one hand each at the ettin and our captive, causing the latter to begin letting out muffled screams of pain.
Throughout the entire proce
ss, Celeste’s expression only turned darker and darker. I knew that what she was doing right now was sifting through his memories, and the cause for her current expression was most likely what she was seeing. Still, at one point her attitude seemed to shift from anger to outright hatred.
When she was done, the man was still pinned to the wall, though his face had changed to show a more feral look. He tried to snarl out, but Celeste appeared in front of him and punched with enough force that her fist went straight through his face, and the wall behind him. Thankfully, that wall led to the adjacent cell, rather than to the vacuum of space.
“Scum.” She spoke under her breath, pulling her fist back. Two of her fingers were shattered, bending in unnatural ways from the force behind her punch. Looking at that, she took a deep breath before looking at us. “Sorry… I need a moment.”
I nodded my head, not wanting to get between an angry robot girl and her ‘chill time’. “Take as long as you need.”
She offered a weak smile, and closed her eyes to calm herself down while I erased the spell formation in the cell, and began repairing the wall by fusing the metal back into place. After a few minutes, she opened her eyes. “Okay… I’m ready.”
“Was it that bad?” Yin asked, looking between Celeste and the headless corpse that had fallen down to the floor.
“Worse…” Celeste shot the body a dirty look. “He tortured them. Even though they were unconscious, unaware, and unable to give him any benefit. He would whip them, beat them, cut them. Because it was fun . Like dolls, he considered them. He would even ‘play house’ by unchaining some of them and posing them together.” She spat out the last words, as if they had left a bad taste in her mouth.
“Was there any information on other bases, or anything we could use?” I had to step in there, not really wanting to hear about all of the horrible things that he had done. Celeste looked up, looking like she had forgotten in her anger what she was supposed to be looking for.
“Right, sorry. He knew about a couple of bases, though not their exact coordinates. However, he was able to see the stars, so I should be able to find the location.” She gave a confident nod. “He also knew about their main base, where they get all their gold and their orders from. However, he had only been there briefly, and during the day. I don’t have enough information to get a location for that one.”
I nodded my head, sighing at the news. “Still, that’s better than what we had before. Any more information about their plans or anything?”
She shook her head slightly at that. “Sorry, but no. According to his memories, every group in the Empire is given separate orders, and nobody knows what anyone else is doing. He was a fairly high ranking individual, but since he was assigned to this secret project, he wasn’t aware of what the rest of the empire was doing. His only job was to stay there and monitor the ‘dolls’.”
“Every so often, they would send another one there, and he would chain them up with the rest. If any of them ever woke up, his job was to kill them immediately. The only way he’d be relieved of duty was if enough of the doppelgangers infiltrated the allied races to force a surrender, or if the base was destroyed.”
I massaged my temples as I heard her explanation. Normally, a good way to break up this kind of organization would be to infiltrate the orders and change them. However, that wasn’t really possible with the system in place. We’d have to use one of those clones to replace the person giving the orders. And if we could do that, it’d be easier to just take them out. “Did he know anything else that would be useful?”
At this, Celeste smirked slightly. “Not really. The only other thing he knew was that their ‘commander in chief’ isn’t quite human anymore.” Seeing the confused faces of myself and Yin, she explained. “Our little cyborg friend here had a face to face meeting with the good Stanley Martin, and noticed something different about him. His eyes were slit, like a snake. He normally wears dark shades to avoid it being noticed, but this guy had cybernetic eyes.”
I furrowed my brows in thought at that news. “Well… every little bit helps.”
Chapter 31: A Good Year
It’s been a good year, hasn’t it?
A message window appeared in front of me, causing me to sigh. We were only an hour or so out from the elven homeworld, and soon it would be time to disembark. What is it, Malthan? You want something?
What, can’t a guy celebrate his birthday?
Sure, go have fun with a goddess. I bet they’d be more than happy to help you celebrate. In all the time that I had been speaking with Malthan, he had never mentioned any birthdays to me. Then again, time seemed to work differently for where the gods lived, so it might really have only been a year or two since this whole mess started.
Way ahead of you, man! You wouldn’t believe how competitive the Goddesses of Beauty and Breasts get in the sack!
And I really don’t want to know. If you can’t keep it in your pants, at least keep it to yourself. I was currently sitting in my room, writing out a report on the events that happened in the New Human Empire base. Although written reports were a bit outdated, and I didn’t technically have a boss that I needed to deliver them to, I figured that a report would be useful to deliver to the alliance representatives.
As much as I hated what happened, this was our first real strike at our enemy. Sure, the first base that we attacked could count to, but we didn’t actually inconvenience them much with it. With this, though, we foiled one of their plans. It may have only been a side plan, but they had to invest a large amount of effort to pull it off.
Aside from that, though, we also had locations for some of their other bases. We were no longer guessing at a starmap and hoping to get lucky. For the first time in this bloody war, we have a plan.
Don’t forget about threesomes with the most attractive divine beings in the cosmos!
Would really like to forget about that, though. Once I finished my report, I organized it and saved it to my computer. After that, I took a quick glance at my grove, and saw that there was barely more than two months left before I hit the final stage. By now, almost all of my planets had been eaten up by the black hole, with only the outermost ones still hanging on the precipice.
At the center of the black hole, I could feel a densely packed ball of mass, containing every type of mana I could recognize and then some. This was likely to become the seed of my new grove, the embryo to the new universe. I still didn’t really know what kind of changes would happen once my grove hit the final stage, and Malthan was being entirely tight-lipped about it. I wanted to try to buy the information from the market, but the price was too expensive for me without my planets of gold.
As I walked through the halls of the ship, wandering aimlessly to pass the time, I couldn’t help but remember everything that had happened until now. From my very first day in NeoLife, cursing Aria for making my life miserable, everything had led up to this. There were times that I wasn’t sure how I had survived, or what I was going to do next, but somehow I always made it.
Throughout my entire adventure, there had been people helping me. People like Sharon, Celeste, Yin and Yang. Whenever I was in trouble, they were there for me. I might not always be able to say the same about myself, but they have been the best friends I could ever ask for.
Hell, even Malthan has been a big help, in his own way. I’m sure that half of my ability to survive somehow was thanks to him. Especially after I got involved with the Qu’Lopti, and he advanced their civilization to help with this war. As much as I hate to admit it, I’d probably have been dead a long time ago if not for him.
It was almost funny, how an unemployed gamer ended up becoming a fighter on the frontlines to protect the universe. Looking back at my life, I could barely recognize who I used to be. Even without being trapped in a time bubble for a century, it felt like the old me was someone completely different. Someone I could almost pity for always being alone, and never having the power to do anything for himself.
&n
bsp; As I got to the bridge, I looked at each of the crew members on duty. Almost all of them were those taken from Sharon’s grove. If my own growth could be called an achievement, than theirs was nothing short of a miracle. They had literally gone from being mindless animals to starship crew members. I don’t think there could be a more exaggerated growth in a single lifetime no matter where you looked.
“Captain, we’re approaching the Gerin system.” One of them, a cat-eared woman, said.
“Alright. Tell everyone to prepare to exit subspace.” I nodded as I sat down in the chair. Now more than ever, I could feel the weight of my responsibilities. I did not belong to any single power, but I was fighting for the freedom of all the races. And as it stands, I was the only one able to do so.
From what Maeve had told me, their doppelganger plan kicked in at the very beginning of this war. It might be that the reason why none of the other races had been willing to send reinforcements was because they had already been replaced at the time. Once the chaos settles from their plan being revealed, we might finally be able to get some help in our fight.
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