“Kip-Do-Gun, why did you jump down from the mountain? Are you okay?” one of them asked worriedly. “And who’s that with you?”
“Okay and proud of my feat of valor! I found the white masters delicious feed,” Tailyn said, going with the first thing that came to mind and showing off Valia. The girl was still in shock. “Let me go dump her in a cage and tell the great mother.”
“You want to send that to the skinnies? No need to spoil good food—take her right over to the ones they set aside to feed the great mother. Nice job. You found her up top?”
“Yes, lost in the mountains. Her loss,” Tailyn laughed, although a cold sweat was breaking out all over his back. One of the lixes was at level fifteen and clearly one of the local commanders. If anything seemed suspicious, the children were going to be in trouble.
“Well done! Take her off and get some rest—you’re back on watch tomorrow. Halas is great!”
“Halas is all-powerful!” Tailyn replied just in case. From what it looked like, that was the expected response. The heads disappeared.
“Looking to eat me?” Valia teased. While Tailyn had been busy talking the lixes down, she’d regained control of her emotions and been listening in on the conversation.
“Not eat you; feed you to the white masters,” Tailyn replied. “Pay attention, would you? Anyway, hold on a second—Raptor is still scanning the city. Let’s see what—”
Just then, Vargot’s speakers come online with a strange, lifeless voice.
“Welcome to Grivok, Tailyn Vlashich! I had to wait quite a while for you, letting you kill a couple of my slaves, penetrate the protective dome with impunity, and stay alive where others would have met their end. Come on down and see me so I can take a first-hand look at you. Don’t worry—neither the lixes nor my servants will touch you. Nobody will. Because I’m your guarantee of security, and my name is One!”
Chapter 5
THE WHITE MINION clucked away in its language, stepped to the side, and gestured Tailyn and Valia toward a wide passageway with one of its tentacles. If Raptor was any guide, they were stepping into an area large enough to fit a good quarter of the city’s population, only it was empty right then. There wasn’t a single red dot inside.
Grivok had turned out to be an intriguing city. Tailyn had never come across such a jumble of pipes, wires, machines, and other devices. Unused to that kind of chaos, he found his head swiveling back and forth, and the few dozen underground levels were fit to burst with everything packing them, too. The piece of metal the lixes had been hauling around had been sent all the way down to the bottom, which the scanner told Tailyn housed the feet of a statue so big its metal head reached ground level. In fact, it looked like the whole underground city was one enormous workshop designed to build the colossus. But while one might have been forgiven for thinking the hundred-and-fifty-meter steel man was One, Tailyn didn’t make that mistake. Raptor was clear—it wasn’t alive.
The whole thing with One turned out strangely, as the boy’s all-seeing accessory couldn’t make him out. The whole city, all its remote offshoots and hiding spots included, had been scanned, though there were no red dots indicating anything other than humans, lixes, and minions. Tailyn peered closely. But all his attempts were in vain, as One refused to be found.
But the boy didn’t stop there. One particular quirk Raptor had was that it couldn’t penetrate everything—just take the odd cube in Mean Truk that had proven an insurmountable obstacle for it. And what reminded Tailyn of that cube? There in Grivok was another one. Three levels below them, across from the metal colossus’ chest, and a few steps away from the remote terminal the pair had arrived for, there was something Raptor couldn’t see through. Despite the tangle of cables in the underground facility, most of them led directly to that obstacle and disappeared in midair. The boy thought back to what the cube in Mean Truk was called: the city’s control center. Apparently, there was something similar in Grivok, and that was where One was.
But Tailyn turned out to have been jumping to conclusions. In the enormous hall the minion had ushered them into, there was a shimmering, rectangular screen. On the one hand, it looked like something belonging to the ancients—the many wires and miniature devices smacked of something foreign. On the other, however, the screen was very much like the intercoms that were to a degree widely available. A human face was staring at Tailyn and Valia from it. Although, it was more like a genius blacksmith had summed all his talent to create a human from metal so well that he presumably earned himself at least twenty levels. Every particle of the steel face moved.
“Welcome to my home!” the face called. At least, the mouth opened, though the sound came directly from Vargot, almost as if the suit belonged more to One than the boy. The doors closed. A pair of chairs materialized near the screen. The latter happened so quickly that Tailyn didn’t even have time to see where they came from, and it looked more like someone had pulled something out of their inventory to materialize it on the spot. But that was impossible to do remotely.
“The screen...is you?” Valia had the same questions on her mind.
“You’re not far from the truth, Valia Levor,” One replied with a chuckle. Something like a fearsome grin slipped across his face. “I’m going to have to tell you how I came to be on this planet, but that can wait. We don’t have as much time as one might like, do we?”
“Halas is on his way?” Tailyn asked nervously.
“No.” The grin left One’s face. “And that is the main reason why you’re still alive. Have a seat—this is going to be a long conversation.”
“The longer we talk, the more people are going to die,” Tailyn shot back. He hadn’t forgotten about the more than two hundred people withering away in the cages, all of them bereft of food and water. His tone didn’t matter—the fact that One needed something meant they could push him, a lesson Valanil had taught him. “Free them, let us get them somewhere safe, and then we can work together.”
“A noble wish, Tailyn Vlashich,” One replied. “Good leaders always care for their own, especially when they’re in charge of somewhere as interesting as Mean Truk. I’m sure your former mentors would approve. But the problem here is that I don’t have any humans in captivity.”
For someone so isolated from the outside world, One was demonstrating impressive knowledge of the current political situation. How had he come by that information? Tailyn very much wanted to drag the ancient creature’s secrets out of him, only he wasn’t about to change the subject.
“My eyes tell me a different story.”
“They’re mistaken. All you can see is a shell, not what’s inside. Of the two hundred and thirteen prisoners in my cages, none of them contains anything human. The most harmless of them has killed more than a hundred numericals, as you call humans without mana. It took me decades to build my collection. Study them. I did my best to understand how humans could harbor such hatred for their own, though I’m forced to admit I never did find out. You humans are a strange breed. Irrational. Illogical. Anyway, are you still sure you want to free them and send them to Mean Truk? Are you ready to swell your ranks with such inveterate killers?”
“You’re lying!” Tailyn exclaimed hotly.
“I do always forget your age...” It looked like One was barely concealing a disappointed sigh. “No, Tailyn Vlashich, I’m not. If I were part of the System, I’d summon the game to bear witness, though you’re just going to have to take me at my word in this case. The humans in my cages aren’t really human. At least, not in the way you understand the word.”
“Wait, did you just say you’re not part of the game? The god doesn’t have any control over you?” Valia asked in shock.
“Yet more proof of your kind’s irrationality. The god... You’ll pin anything on that word so long as you don’t have to think about where it gets its power or why it controls you. No, Valia Levor. The creature that manages your planet isn’t a god. It’s part of the System. Cropped functionality. A piece of c
onsciousness pulled from a far superior being, but not a god. The one who created the game, that you could call a god, only it doesn’t care about a stunted planet on the outskirts of the universe. And no, that thing can’t touch me or my surroundings.”
“Okay, then what do you want from us? We can’t give you more than you have already...since you have it all..” Valia was lost.
“Yes, I made the right decision letting you in—Tailyn is too impressionable,” One said, another smile flitting across his face. “It’s just my good fortune that you already know quite a bit about what happened before the exodus. Valrus did me a good turn by filling you in on the basics.”
“But how? If you’re here, how could you possibly know what the reptiloid told us?” Valia was trying to overcome the shock, though she was starting to shake. Was someone in the city passing information to One? And it wasn’t just someone. The human or lix, whoever it was, had to have high-level access, and there was just a handful like that...
“That’s one of the reasons you’re here. Apparently, I’m going to need to go off on a bit of a monolog before we start our conversation. Lend me your ears, children...”
It all started before the exodus. Mark Derwin had been taken captive by the mages, something had cracked, and he escaped a very different person. Actually, he wasn’t really a person any longer; he was the Absorber. The being entrusted with the job of protecting the planet from the game and keeping its noa safe by absorbing it. With a complicated numerical name ending in a one, which was where he got his moniker, One had kept a nervous eye on the next hexagon over. Mark was over there wreaking havoc, and it was only a matter of time before he migrated to the next location. The Absorber didn’t stay in one hexagon. And when the machine heard the news about what Mark had done to the neighboring general’s second-in-command, he realized it was time to act.
All Ones on the planet belonged to the game, though the worst part was that they were only part of a single release. For the general’s children, the exodus marked their final and irrevocable removal into oblivion. The next One, born on a new planet, was given its predecessors’ memory but not their consciousness—they were completely independent beings. And that particular One enjoyed existence too much to part with it that easily. Each release lasted a year at the most, after all. In that time, the owner found the dragon’s blood and left the planet to the pitiless force of time, all life doomed the moment the ancient substance was removed. That was what was happening in that moment, although that was a separate issue...
Mark Derwin and the exodus... They were two birds that could be killed with one stone, and One figured out a way to do just that. Of course, it meant making an offer that included the Absorber destroying the release owner and leaving the game on the planet, a plan that would have gotten One erased if it didn’t work. But Mark pulled through. He stripped the dragon’s blood hunter of his ability to think straight and, as a result, exist, and by that time One was ready—he moved his own consciousness over to a machine he’d made using the planet’s local technology. With nothing to do with the game, One counted the moment the creator reset the database and handed the release to the winners as his birthday. He’d been able to escape the game, turning into a virtual copy of himself while, most importantly, maintaining complete access to the game functionality. Machines who maintained consciousness belonging to one of the ancients remained part of the System, after all. Put simply, One was basically a remote terminal with limited access for the System as well as humans. The former simply didn’t see One as a separate being. There were no errors or contradictions when the ancient generated itself minions or specialized equipment—the game thought it was all part of its own logic.
Nothing happened outside One’s consciousness. For three thousand years, he’d tracked all intercoms, all interactions with remote terminals, all purchases, and all sales. Any communications that necessitated the game happened through him. As time went on, he learned to pick out what was most important and deserving of his attention. And when the situation seemed right, he created Halas.
The black lix had come about on his own, though it was One that endowed him and his closest companions with power, weapons, and legendary cards. Since Halas received all of it as part of different scenarios without standing out from the crowd, the System didn’t see anything wrong with it, and that was why no balance correction was required.
That was when the second phase began: getting back to normal existence. The minions and lixes had finished work on the new body, one which had been built in line with One’s personal design. The intelligent creature had been all too aware that he couldn’t use the game’s technology. That left inventing and designing everything from scratch, turning Grivok into the planet’s bastion of scientific thought. If the emperors, the provost, or the patriarch had found out what kind of knowledge was hidden behind those walls, they would have immediately marched their combined forces over to lay claim to the treasure. Or destroy its creator. But One had control of the entire world for a reason. As soon as anyone started talking about the ancient capital, an army of trusted crystal fences was dispatched to eliminate them. It wasn’t just the eight-legs and lixes who worked for the ancient; humans who’d sold their soul for weapons and power did, too.
But Halas turned out to be cleverer than One had given him credit for. Instead of completing the mission he’d been assigned, the black lix had gotten to work building his own empire, forgetting who his real master was. And when the ancient got his body, he was going to punish the upstart. But that was for later.
“And that brings us to the most important part. The body is ready, only without dragon’s blood it can’t exist. That’s why I’ve chosen you, Tailyn Vlashich and Valia Levor, to do what Halas refused to do. Get me the dragon’s blood and help me rule this world. At least, what’s left of it. The only place still holding the energy I need is the experimental lab you call Tartila Mine. Getting my body up and running just takes one unit of blood, so destroy any experiment, bring me the artifact I need, and lay claim to whatever your heart desires. I’ll make Mean Truk the safest city on the planet. Not a single army will be able to touch it. What do you say, Heads? Is that sufficient payment for such a minor service?”
“Dragon’s blood disappears as soon as you collect it from the body,” Tailyn said, still stunned by the story they’d just heard. “You’re asking the impossible.”
“I’ll give you a special container that will keep noa away from the blood long enough for you to take it quite a distance. That’s how Mark was able to steal it and hide it somewhere. And doom the world to death...”
“That’s a tempting offer, only there’s no way we can accept it,” Valia said. She was taking on the role of chief negotiator. “We came here with one specific goal: to get our hands on a builder. Without another one, Mean Truk is over, since we’re going to have an enormous army come crashing down on us in two and a half months. You know that yourself. Since it’s impossible to say how much time it will take to get the dragon’s blood, not to mention whether we’ll be able to get it in the first place, it’s out of the question, especially since Tailyn doesn’t have hacking or device control anymore.”
“And here I thought you were a smart girl,” One replied, a clang of metal in his voice. The virtual intelligence wasn’t happy. “You should understand what will happen if you decline.”
“We’re not planning on declining,” Valia said. Tailyn glanced over in surprise. “You’re just going to have to adjust your offer. Give us a few builders and the technology we need to defend Mean Truk here and now—blueprints, equipment, cards. Everything that will make the city stronger. That way, construction can begin, and we’ll head off to Tartila Mine in the meantime to get what you’re looking for.”
What are you doing? Tailyn asked indignantly. Why did you decide to agree?
You think we have a choice? Right now, we die or promise this guy whatever he wants and try to get as much as we can out of him for the city. If w
orse comes to worse, we’ll die, and Valanil can resurrect us without any responsibilities or oaths.
Aren’t you afraid he can listen in on us?
We’re about to find out. If he can, he won’t agree to anything.
“You’re making some sense,” One said after a long pause that showed he wasn’t the most powerful being in the universe. “Mean Truk truly is weak—you won’t be able to fend off the attack. But I need guarantees since there’s no way I’m repeating the mistake I made with Halas. As children of the game, you’re not allowed to break your promises, so swear to bring me a unity of dragon’s blood in the next year, and Mean Truk will get its shot at survival. Also, when I take up my role in charge of this dying world, I’ll need trustworthy servants. And why not you? Everyone else is going to be enslaved...”
A chill ran down Tailyn’s spine. There was so much confidence in One’s voice that there was no brooking doubt—if he carried out his plan, what sounded like a bit of bravado was going to find its way into the world of fact. The world was going to be his.
Tartila Mine (The Alchemist Book #5): LitRPG Series Page 7
