The veteran of quite a few releases, the Absorber knew all too well what was going on. The fabric was real. It hadn’t been processed by the game’s nanoparticles. Tossing Tailyn off into the far corner of the hole to make sure he didn’t get in the way or think about attacking from the rear, Mark went over to the tarp. It felt to the touch like regular canvas, the kind they made tents out of. And while it was moving in a breeze coming from the other side, Derwin couldn’t move it an iota no matter how hard he pushed. A shiver ran down his side. Far from excitement, what he was feeling was a dilemma. One of the Absorber’s functions was to find remains of the real world in the new game world and destroy them, only that wasn’t why he was there. That was his job during releases. After three thousand years under the System’s control, there shouldn’t have been anything on the planet even reminiscent of life before the game. It was impossible.
But that didn’t change the fact that the immovable wall was right there, almost laughing at the Absorber. When he’d gone through the gate to reach that planet, Mark had left his belongings behind, everything with particles of reality built in included. That was the only thing he could have used on the cloth. Even if Armageddon had happened in the game, that piece of canvas would have remained untouched—only similar things in the universe with all its copies of Earth could poke a hole in it. And they were what Mark made. Game devices with a dusting of reality. Over the previous fifteen hundred years, players had made use of his inventions, earning him enough to purchase his freedom. But they only used them in new releases, not in the worlds remaining post-exodus. Although...
Mark turned to look at Tailyn. The boy had crawled as far away as he could and was even holding Fang out in front of him in an attempt to defend himself. That hadn’t taken long. Once again, Mark’s perception pointed out the strange wall that deflected Valkyrie’s shots, though he wasn’t about to open fire. He made sure the boy was looking at him before piping up.
“If we don’t figure out what’s going on with this wall, your planet’s going to die. And soon. Everything you’ve ever known and loved will come to nothing. But if you help me, they’ll be okay, and I’ll leave you alone so long as we’re working together. What’s happening now is more important than my mission. So, what do you say, Tailyn Vlashich? Are you prepared to protect your planet? If you are, you need to get through this cloth.”
“That’s not a cloth; it’s a wall. And there’s nothing behind it,” came the answer. Tailyn saw no way to escape or beat Mark, and he was ready to take his second mortal blow and watch him disappear, only he’d started acting strangely. Instead of killing the boy, he was opening up. Something about the planet dying? That was absurd. Still, the boy figured he could leverage the moment to escape, although he had to admit the space they were in reeked of secrets. And the secrets were coming in the form of the simplest of materials.
“It’s cloth, only it’s from another world. Or rather, it’s from another time, back from the planet before the game. There are no nanoparticles in it—the black dust everything turns into once it’s destroyed. Since Fang has a bit of reality in it, you can use it to get through and see what’s hidden on the other side.”
The news was so surprising that Tailyn found himself looking down at his new weapon. Was that why it could kill any monster? Stunning. Though, it made sense, since nothing else about the dagger was anything special, just simple bone like any other. A thought crossed Tailyn’s mind.
“Wait, is that why I can’t fly? Fang is blocking it?”
“Not Fang; the material built into its blade,” Mark replied impatiently. “Are you going to save the planet, or should we go back to fighting?”
“What kind of an idiot do you take me for?” Tailyn was starting to push back—the Absorber needed him, and he could use that. “If we go back to fighting, you’re going to try to finish me off. But that won’t work, and you’ll be sent back to wherever you came from, probably for another twelve hours. That will give me time to figure out what’s going on. I’ll have plenty of time to cut through the cloth and grab whatever’s on the other side.”
“Okay, what do you want?” Impatience gave way to annoyance. It had been a long time since Mark had been the one asking, used as he was to being the one other people begged and pleaded with for favors.
“I want you to leave me alone!” Tailyn said, himself disbelieving he could pull it off. But Valanil and Valia had taught him to go for broke when he wanted something—you could always back off your asking price later so long as it’s still a good deal.
“That’s impossible. You destroyed the black slime, which my partner developed when the game was on this planet. Since his entire business model is built on the assumption that the slime is indestructible, he’ll be eaten alive if anyone finds out the opposite is true. He’ll even be ripped out of the real world. And I owe him too much to let that happen. The System and I have a deal—the information isn’t going anywhere. So, that just leaves you.”
“That’s it?” a stunned Tailyn asked. “You’re here because of the black slime?! Not because I’ve been using concentrated noa to resurrect people?”
The pause dragged out. Mark Derwin, rank twelve—the maximum—Absorber, member of the Po order, blood brother of Villian Po, one of the game’s richest players, and the terror of half the known universe, had turned into a statue as he tried to figure out what to do. His personal life was clashing with his public life. The whole reason Absorbers existed was to preserve the noa on whichever planet they were on by eating it. The concentration plants, the ones that made the blue spheres, were the Absorbers’ most fiercely protected treasures, their farms despite the fact that they belonged to the release owner. Still, three thousand years later, Mark had yet to figure out why the creator and its team needed noa. The ruler of most of the universe declined to answer questions, never getting into detail and only once mentioning something about experiments having to do with planet fusion. The galactic community had never liked seeing all the copies of Earth floating around the known universe. Apparently, it was time for the creator to correct its mistake by restoring its home planet, and that was what the concentrated noa had to be for.
But that wasn’t what had Mark frozen with indecision. Yet another immutable fact was under attack: only concentration plants and Absorbers were permitted to make noa. Nobody and nothing else.
“You’re lying. The System couldn’t have let you make noa!”
“Why not? That’s exactly what it did. Wait, we’re talking about these spheres, right?” Tailyn asked in surprise, pulling one out of his inventory. “The ones that let you resurrect other beings?”
“This planet really has lost it.” The centuries-old stone crunched as Mark took his emotions out on it, after which he slumped to the ground. What was he supposed to do next? Personal life or public life? Villian or Tailyn? Friendship or duty? It was a difficult choice.
“So, we’re agreed? You’re not going to try to kill me?” Tailyn asked, disliking the pause and deciding to break the silence. “We have a planet to save, after all.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Mark forced out as he sentenced Villian to death. Duty took precedence over friendship—the game was at stake. “But I have questions, and the answers are going to determine what happens to you. There will be time enough for that later, however—we need to make sure the planet will be okay first. Somebody hung this material here to keep their crime off scanners, and your planet is in big trouble if I’m right. You swear you won’t turn Fang on me; I promise I’ll leave the planet as soon as we have our talk. You’ll be left alive to get back to whatever it was you were doing.”
Tailyn was happy knocking one problem off his list. The System recorded the mutual oath, and an odd icon appeared on his condition line.
Sign of the Absorber. Description: no action or inaction on the part of Mark Derwin, rank 12 Absorber, can do you mortal damage.
Fang slipped easily through the cloth and cut a hole in what had seemed
like a solid wall. That done, the pair was able to use their hands to widen the space and peer inside, Raptors still showing there was nothing there despite what they could see with their eyes.
“That’s what I was afraid of...” Derwin muttered. “Makes sense why this location is called Tartila Mine... Phew.”
Tailyn couldn’t help but agree. What they were looking at was awe-inspiring. Incredible.
“Make a door—we need to take care of this.”
A few cuts later, and Tailyn had opened up a way through the cloth, letting in a gentle blue light coming from a few hundred big crystal veins. There were dozens of odd mechanism hovering around each of them as they mined in direct defiance of the System’s orders. Aliens were robbing Tailyn’s planet blind.
Mark picked a handful of pebbles up off the ground and tossed them into the space, filling it with game nanoparticles. Tailyn followed suit. Then, they did it again. And again. When they ran out of stones, Mark had to knock off pieces of the wall, and it was only half an hour later that the System figured out what was going on. That elicited an angry message with red lines appearing in front of every intelligent creature on the planet:
General notification!
A strict prohibition on the use and distribution of crystals is being instituted on the planet. For the next 200 years, crystals may not be mined. All violators will be instantly destroyed. All crystals have been removed from circulation in order to restore the natural balance, and there will be no taxes for the indicated period.
“I’m just afraid your planet doesn’t have another two hundred years in it,” Mark Derwin said. “My estimate gives you twenty before everyone dies.”
Chapter 14
Mission complete: Soaked in Nanoparticles.
Level +1 (104)
Monster Knowledge +1 (53)
TAILYN SAT DOWN on the stone and wiped his brow. More than six hours of continuous work had worn out both him and the Absorber, the latter joining the boy and holding out a bottle of some kind of yellow drink. Not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, Tailyn downed whatever it was. A pleasant feeling flooded his body with healing power. And that couldn’t have come at a better time. Out under the dome of real material, his body had been behaving strangely—the longer he was there, the more tired he felt. Trips outside to catch his breath were a necessity, and the pauses lasted longer and longer. The System was pushing its children to work harder, too. For the god to see what was happening inside the space, it needed a few tons of rock, and since it couldn’t get the rock in by itself, it had to threaten the pair with instant annihilation unless they did its dirty work for it. Even the Absorber complied. There was no way he was leaving the planet without his conversation with Tailyn.
The boy’s regeneration was overjoyed by the stimulant and quickly remembered what it was supposed to be doing, masking the physical weariness though doing nothing about the emotional exhaustion. Tailyn checked the time he had left with Fang and frowned. It was running out. With just around four hours left to find the remaining parts of the Cleaner or get to Griala, he was going to have a tough time moving painstakingly through the laboratory.
The pile of rocks Tailyn and Mark had dragged into the enormous cavern began putting out flexible, snake-like growths, most of which headed straight for the alien machines. A few of them, however, slithered out, attached themselves to the mountain, and began sucking it into the protected area. Growing stronger and sturdier, they showed the System’s efforts to figure out what was going on.
The location where the looters had settled turned out to be intriguing. First and foremost, there was a perfectly round lake that was so intensely blue it might have been colored. But it really was just water—Tailyn couldn’t help checking. Under the dome, Raptor began working weakly, and Mark immediately announced that the lake had no bottom. The hole five meters across reached all the way down to the border of the game three kilometers below them, and even Mark’s scanner couldn’t see beyond that. Still, he didn’t doubt it continued on past the edge of the game location. But the most interesting part wasn’t in the water; it was around it. Weaving in and out of each other, enormous crystal veins grew in whimsical shapes. It took perception some time to calculate how many there were, the final count turning out to be more than two hundred. And they were continuously regenerating. As fast as the alien machines could destroy the blue outcroppings, new ones popped up to replace them, the process taking just half an hour. Finally, it was clear why the location was called Tartila Mine. The pair had found its heart, a place where crystals grew endlessly rather than the swamp above the laboratory. The mined crystals were being loaded into an odd construction that looked at a distance to be something like a stationary portal. Mark cursed when he saw it.
“Zero-space passage. Someone’s really after Earth if they paid up for one of those. It’s impossible to track the owner, and they’re activated automatically once a week.”
“So, we can’t do anything about that?” Tailyn watched ruefully as the god cleansed the location. Fat strands threw themselves at the machines, engulfed them, and began glowing with immense heat. Faced with such an intense onslaught, the real devices had no chance.
“Nothing at all,” Mark replied. “The System won’t let us take even a piece of real material. Although, I’m more worried by the fact that the game still hasn’t calculated the damage—the reward functionality usually works faster than this...”
“Where’s the water coming from?” Tailyn asked, his glance darting over to the blue circle.
“There’s an underground river twenty meters below us. Whoever designed this location was a pro—everything was built with real materials, only they didn’t touch the river, just leaving passageways for the water to go through. Not a single gap shows up on scanners. Really, it’s too good, and that worries me, too.”
Just then, the game deigned to deliver its rewards.
Players Tailyn Vlashich and Valia Levor!
The System thanks you for your timely assistance. With your help, poachers were destroyed, though the planets destruction cannot be stopped with existing resources. The time calculated for noa to disappear and all beings on the planet to be sterilized: 112 days. This information is confidential and may not be disclosed to third parties on pain of annihilation.
***
Fang mission canceled.
Tartila Mine mission modified: all dragon’s blood gained by destroying Experiments will be transferred to the System. 2 experiments remaining. Time remaining: 24 hours.
***
Tailyn Vlashich, you have 2 average and 2 lesser cores. If you transfer them to the System, all participants in your Unification will be gifted the right to join the main game at your current progress level. If you decline, you will be assessed a penalty.
***
You performed a blessed deed.
Level +3 (107).
Anatomy Master +3 (55).
“Who is Valia, and where did you get dragon’s blood?” Mark asked in surprise after quickly reading through the message the local System had generated. It wasn’t a secret for him—a few settings and his advanced scanning gave him access to whatever any other being was seeing so long as they were next to him. Of course, there needed to be a fairly substantial level difference, as well, but there weren’t many intelligent creatures in the universe who were more advanced than Mark. The situation itself was exactly as Mark had anticipated. Things were bad, and he needed to get off the planet in a hurry. Finding himself stuck there forever wasn’t an option.
“Valia is my betrothed, and I got the blood for killing some local monsters,” Tailyn explained in an odd tone. His head was pounding; dark circles were dancing in front of his eyes. Nothing the god had written fit the boy’s understanding of the world, and he was rocked.
“Betrothed? At twelve?” Mark snorted dubiously. “But even so, what does she have to do with anything? Why did the game name her, too?”
“Probably because of unification,” Ta
ilyn forced out. All he wanted to do was break down sobbing, huddle in a corner, and feel sorry for himself, but he was holding on. His nerves felt shot, and it was by his fingernails, but holding on he was. All too well, he understood that Fang was soon to become a useless plaything, One’s mission was going to be failed, and Mean Truk was staring down complete destruction just because Tailyn had decided to take on Mark Derwin. And if that was the case, he needed to figure out a way out of the situation rather than just feeling miserable.
Mark took another look at Tailyn. He was well acquainted with unification, having come across it fifteen hundred years before. In fact, that pair had been the toughest, most relentless he’d had to deal with in his time in the game. They’d even managed to knock him out of that release. Of course, they’d paid for it with their lives, though they’d been successful in protecting their copy of Earth. But everything was happening again...
Tartila Mine (The Alchemist Book #5): LitRPG Series Page 19
