Chương 60: Chapter 53 - The servers are getting ghosted

The staircase went down for a long time. Pale stone steps spiraled through raw asteroid rock, lit by nothing I could identify, which was the tower's favorite kind of lighting. I counted the first two hundred steps, gave up, and did my accounting instead. Seventy-two million mana and change. The trial had cost almost nothing. The stairs ended at a door. Reinforced, industrial, with a pressure seal around the frame and a blank plaque bolted at eye level. No text on it. I walked to the door. It hissed and opened.

I passed through. The door started closing behind me. The receiving bay on the other side was the size of a warehouse. Cargo crates in neat rows, a loading crane folded against the ceiling, and a wall of floodlights that all snapped on at once, aimed directly at my face. Six turrets unfolded from the walls in smooth arcs. Barrels the size of my forearm locked onto my center of mass. Across the bay, behind a glass partition, figures moved.

Guards in Paradise-marked uniforms sprang into action, eight of them, weapons already rising. At a console of wet, veined material sat an operator, hand hovering over the interface. The moment that hand touched the console, Paradise would know exactly who had walked onto their floor. Name, face, floor of origin, the works. And a talk with an intake operator wasn't going to end with me strolling off unregistered. Better they knew nothing. Mass summon.

I snap-summoned two hundred tentacle worms all over the guards, and especially the console. An automated voice filled the bay.

"Unscheduled arrival detected. Please remain—" Detonate. The worms exploded, obliterating the guards, the operator, and the console. The blast pressed against my shields. Crates disintegrated. The turrets went from weapons to modern art. The glass partition ceased to be a concept. Smoke. Silence. Somewhere, a sprinkler system made a valiant attempt and died. Then, from somewhere far beyond the ruined bay, a klaxon started. Not in here. In here, everything that could scream was dead.

The sound came muffled through the far wall, a long, patient two-tone wail. Not the most exciting alarm I've heard. So the announcement had gone out after all. Or the console had gotten one dying twitch in. Either way, the floor now knew someone had arrived, and that intake had stopped answering. They just didn't know what had arrived. I intended to keep it that way. I continued walking.

[ENEMY DEFEATED — PARADISE SITE SECURITY, GRADE II (x8)] [ENEMY DEFEATED — PARADISE INTAKE OPERATOR (x1)] [ENEMY DEFEATED — AUTOMATED DEFENSE TURRET (x6)] [Drops: Metal Plating Segment (Uncommon) (x5), Bio-conductive Filament (Uncommon) (x3), 21 silver, 402 copper] As I passed through the destruction, I called out the Lantern of Eternal Suffering. Teal light washed over the ruined bay, and the souls came, nine of them, streaming into the flame. Paradise employees burned the exact same color as everyone else.

The bay's far wall held a set of blast doors, warped by my worms but jammed half-open on their rails. I squeezed through the gap. The floor opened in front of me like the inside of a hollowed world. The asteroid's interior stretched so far that the other side blurred into haze. Miles of open space, ringed by mining terraces carved into the rock in descending shelves, each one crawling with distant machinery.

Ore rivers ran along magnetic rails, glowing lines of molten orange threading between smelter stacks that vented into recycler towers. Worker barracks clung to the terrace walls in stacked rows, thousands of lit windows like a hive holding its breath. And through it all fell three waterfalls, each larger than any I had ever seen, falling from nowhere to nowhere. This wasn't the inside of the asteroid I had done the trial on, that much I knew.

The tower had some non-standardly connected space, so the waterfalls probably fell through such an anomaly. The klaxon rolled across all of it, echoing between the terraces. Down on the shelves, floodlights were switching from work-white to alert-amber in slow waves, like the whole facility was blushing. A signboard stood on the catwalk beside me, corporate-cheerful lettering over a tally counter. EXTRACTION SITE THETA — 412 DAYS SINCE LAST INCIDENT. I glanced back at the smoking receiving bay.

Someone was going to have to reset that. The catwalk fed into a service stairway, which fed into the upper terrace, which was where the actual problem began. The upper terrace had people on it, and thanks to me, all of them were awake in the professional sense. Patrols moved along the rail lines in fours now, combat-armored, rifles unslung and carried properly. Miners stood in loose clumps outside their shift stations, herded there by the alarm, faces the universal color of overtime plus inconvenience.

Overhead, observation drones had abandoned their lazy circuits for tight, twitchy sweeps, bio-mechanical, single wet lens apiece, all of them pointed at things instead of past them. Lovely. I had personally upgraded this floor's difficulty before setting foot on it. I pulled the wanderer cloak tighter and summoned Yushi. She materialized upside-down at my shoulder in a puff of icy mist, fan already covering her face.

"Ku ku ku... Damian-sama summons Yushi into a gloomy industrial hellscape, full of armed men, during an active alarm. Yushi has read this manga too. The cute one always gets captured and interrogated."

"You wish. Scout the patrol routes ahead. I need a path down and away from the populated terraces. Quietly. They're looking for someone, so assume everything is watched." The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"Whose fault might that be?" She sank through the catwalk floor before I could answer, which was for the best, because I didn't have one. Soon after, a misty shape of her appeared ahead, pointing me in a direction. I moved, then stopped when she signaled me to stop. I spent easily three hours learning the rhythm of a floor that had just been kicked. The patrols ran overlapping loops now, eight minutes instead of twelve, but they ran them as men who had drilled the route and never once needed it.

They checked the obvious places, chokepoints, stair heads, crane platforms, and they checked them thoroughly, and they checked nothing else. The drones followed the rail lines and the catwalk mains. The miners looked at nothing that wasn't directly assigned to them, alarm or no alarm, which remained the deepest form of camouflage this place offered. Four hundred and twelve days without an incident meant four hundred and twelve days of nobody finding anything. Searching was a skill, and this floor had rusted. Still.

All it took was one bored guard with functioning eyes. At a junction between two terrace levels, I flattened into the shadow of a slag heap while a security detail shuffled a clump of miners back into their barracks. Yushi drifted up through the terrace floor.

"Ku ku... patrol ahead turned early. Four men, sixty meters, coming this way. And they are actually looking. Yushi recommends the ore cart." There actually was an ore cart near the junction, open-topped and half full of raw rock. I climbed in and lay down among the ore. The patrol's boots rang past on the rail-side grating, close enough that I could hear one of them complaining that the intruder was probably long gone and the overtime wasn't even paid at alert rates.

A rat-thing with too many legs scuttled over my chest, paused on my sternum, and stared at me. Its eyes looked judgmental, as if a creature living in an ore cart could still be doing better than me. Given the current state of my life, I didn't have a counterargument. The boots faded. I climbed out, brushing rock dust off the cloak. Yushi floated above me.

"That was very dignified."

"Route."

"Ku ku ku. This way, Damian-sama." The direction took me down a flight of stairs. The staging yard sat at the bottom of the fourth terrace, behind the smelter row, and it was beautiful. Steel. Processed, refined, tower-forged steel, stacked in ingot piles taller than me, each bar as long as my arm and stamped with the Paradise sigil. Rows and rows of it, sitting under floodlights, waiting for a rail shipment that was about to develop an inventory discrepancy.

And I knew a certain sword-girl who had personally memorized Siegfried's statue requirements, on account of relentlessly campaigning for him to be summoned. I summoned Ashy, pressing a finger to my lips as she appeared. She actually noticed, only skipping into a cute pose instead of announcing herself to the terrace. I motioned at the steel. Her eyes went wide, then greedy. She hopped to it, jumped with arms spread, and grabbed as much as she could. I unsummoned her, together with the steel. We repeated it.

On the third pass, a drone swung off the rail line and drifted toward the yard, wet lens rotating. I yanked Ashy out of existence mid-grab, an ingot still clattering off the pile, and flattened behind the stack while the drone hovered over the yard, staring at steel that was, as far as it knew, guilty of nothing. It logged whatever drones logged, and drifted on. Two more passes after that. That had to suffice. Yushi led me on, deeper and down.

The klaxon had gone quiet somewhere during the heist, replaced by periodic announcements about remaining vigilant, delivered in a corporate voice that had clearly given up on being believed. We soon reached a sector without people. The dead sector started without a border. The rails just stopped being maintained, then stopped being rails. The terraces here had been mined out and stripped, floodlights dark or missing, barracks empty with their doors hanging open. Dust lay thick enough to record history.

No patrols came here, not even at alert. There was nothing to guard, and nobody had ever hidden here in four hundred and twelve days, so nobody ever would. Paradise had eaten this part of the asteroid and moved on. Perfect. I picked a collapsed side gallery off the main shaft, behind a slag fall, where the ceiling had come down a generation ago, and nobody had a reason to return. Now for the delicate part. Cassandra watched me through the pod interface, more or less whenever she pleased.

The jade cube could blind that feed for exactly one minute. Whatever I did during that minute, she wouldn't see, though she would still know my rough location, and she would absolutely notice the gap. I couldn't do much about either. The Yamato beacon, meanwhile, would call in whoever was listening on the syndicate's end. Reinforcements, ideally. But anyone who could track the beacon's signal would come to the beacon, and I preferred that arrival to happen nowhere near my sleeping body. Beacon in one place.

Me, far away, in another. And Cassandra never saw the beacon exist at all. I fished the jade cube out of my pocket and pressed the button as I walked. The jade shield formed around me, a faint green distortion that moved with my steps. I bolted. Sprinted into a side room off the gallery and pulled the Yamato syndicate beacon from my inner pocket. Sleek, black, red Japanese characters down the side, and still somehow alien-technology-like. I pressed the stud on its flank. It lit up with a soft pulse.

I shoved it deep behind a rockfall and sprinted back. I hit the main path with seconds left on the cube, straightened my suit, and kept walking at an unhurried pace as the field cut out. I slid the dead cube back into my pocket. Six hours to recharge. To an outside observer, it would have looked like a minute of lost connection, during which I had simply walked forward down a corridor. Boring. Unremarkable. The kind of glitch you note and forget. As I walked further, I pulled on Yushi in a command.

She appeared in an instant, clearly having been around already.

"Damian-sama?" I pulled the writhing thumb drive out of my pocket.

"Take this, hide, and after the alarm ends, fly to their headquarters, find the servers in their basement or somewhere similar that's unwatched and looks important. Plug this in. Keep it concealed until I wake up, and then take it with you, and leave it in Hell after I unsummon you." She narrowed her eyes.

"What makes you think innocent Yushi could do that?"

"If you can spank Ashy, you can materialize at will. You could even materialize your saliva and ectoplasm, so there's no way you can't dematerialize a small object, take it with you, and rematerialize it. The instruction I gave you is a direct command." I pushed it in as such. She had to do it now. No matter what. A little cloud appeared above Yushi. A small lightning flashed, and the cloud started raining on her. Yushi's hair fell, as if wet.

"Yushi has failed at being a mysterious ghost. Damian-sama is indefensibly observant." She took the thumb drive, dematerializing it from my hand.

"And he's noticing all of Yushi's darkest secrets." In a wheeze of a wind, she vanished, together with the cloud. Still had like ten seconds, so I kept walking. And once the field vanished, the cube spent, I took quite a bit more of a walk, giving it almost half an hour before I stopped, putting an honest amount of dead tunnel between me and the beacon. Finally, when I was hopefully far enough, I picked a nice side room, one with old, broken workshop equipment.

A few tables, some saws, what I would describe as a rock breaker, all rusty and damaged, not worth moving out. I settled on a soft-looking rock and lay down. I needed rest, and ideally, the misdirected beacon would bring me reinforcements instead of an execution squad. I didn't exactly have the mana to deal with an entire floor myself, and even if I had, I would have needed to save it for the next ones. This was the mining floor. They weren't going to keep the vital stuff here. That would be on floors 33 and 34.

I pulled on Yushi. She appeared in a cold breeze.

"Do you desire me to watch you sleep, Damian-sama?" Good. She got the point that she shouldn't speak of the drive.

"Go find the trial to the next floor, and try to map the floor's layout. Note where the patrols concentrate now that they're stirred up."

"Not the most exciting of commands, but it will be done." She vanished again. Good. I focused and collapsed inward into my soul chamber. In there, I did the chain resummoning of Ashy to bring in the steel, pile by pile. Then I shaped the statue of Siegfried from it, working from how I remembered him. It looked decent enough. Now I needed the broken swords for the base. Yeah, those were going to be a problem. This wasn't exactly a sword-fighting floor.

Or a set of floors, actually, because while floors one to twenty-five had been mostly random in theme, everything up here felt like one continuous area. The one thing I kept circling back to was the floor bosses. The floor 11 boss, the centaur, had been by an absolute mile the strongest boss I had met yet. It wasn't even close. Most likely some Paradise shenanigans. Something disturbed me from reality. I returned there, falling out of the soul chamber and back into my body.

Cassandra sat on a nearby worktable, legs crossed, leaning with her chin on her palm.

"You've been a bad boy."