Chương 62: Chapter 55 - The Three Unpaid Interns

As we started getting closer to the not-abandoned areas, I once again summoned Yushi. She appeared with a giggle.

"I see Damian-sama cannot stay without me." Liu and Henrik both snorted. We moved along a maintenance gallery one terrace below the main rail lines, three abreast where the tunnel allowed it, single file where it didn't. Yushi drifted through the rock ahead of us like a very smug sonar, popping her upper half out of walls to point directions.

"Ku ku ku... the three emperors," she said, emerging from the ceiling for the fifth time.

"Sneaking through a mine. Like three unpaid interns."

"How far to the next patrol?" I asked.

"Four minutes. Two men. One complains about his knee. The other agrees with everything the first one says. A tragic marriage." She sank back into the stone. Henrik walked with his tablet out, glasses layering scan after scan over the tunnel.

"Her range is remarkable. What is the upkeep on her?"

"Almost nothing. She mostly runs on malice."

"I heard that," echoed from inside the wall. Liu smiled, hands folded into his sleeves, robe somehow not catching on a single piece of rusted equipment. The tunnel actively tried to snag my cloak every ten steps. His robe flowed through the place like it had diplomatic immunity.

"So," I said.

"I suppose we need to get to their control station."

"Not necessarily," Henrik replied.

"They might have everything connected on one internal network. They did it on floor 22. With that, any terminal will do, as the network worm I've prepared will chew through it all." A shift station might suffice, then. I remembered one nearby. It sat at a junction two terraces down, a prefab box bolted to the rock with a window, a door, and a terminal inside glowing the Paradise-trademark bio-mechanical amber. A single wet lens above the screen watched the room, currently dark. Dormant.

Yushi flew through the area and confirmed everything was empty. The shift wasn't active, apparently. We stepped to the booth, and Liu hit the door with an open palm. Golden aura pulsed through it, and it swung open. We slipped inside. Henrik sat down at the terminal like a man coming home, cracked his knuckles, and pulled a cable from his sleeve, connecting his tablet to a port that was half USB, half nostril. His glasses lit up with cascading glyphs.

"It is powered."

"That was fast."

"Almost too fast." He worked on the tablet, swiftly typing, swiping, or both. Thirty seconds passed. The cascading glyphs kept cascading. Henrik's expression went from triumphant to focused to the very specific face of a man rereading an email that ruined his day. Yushi giggled in the background. She didn't need to add more. Henrik, slightly flustered, said, "The network is more segmented than I had hoped for."

"What have the heavens blessed us with?" Liu asked.

"Ore tonnage," he said flatly.

"And?"

"Shift rosters." A pause.

"The feed for the incident counter." Liu leaned over his shoulder.

"Four hundred and twelve days since the last incident. Commendable."

"It's a display," Henrik said through his teeth, unplugging the cable with more force than the operation required.

"A slaved terminal. It receives data. It stores nothing, decides nothing, and connects to nothing but its own feed line. It is, functionally, a very expensive poster."

"The feed line doesn't go both ways?"

"No. They actually have decent network security. The most I could do would be to inject code through their quarterly output. That is not what we need."

"Yeah."

"What I did find is that we are in sector sixty-seven-C-E-C, according to their map." He swiped on the tablet, bringing it up.

"There is no control centre here, but there is a large production line further down." He pointed at a large object on the screen. Yushi poked her head from the wall.

"I can confirm the control center's hiding spot. It's all the way on the side of the floor. Yushi couldn't find a second one." Henrik disconnected from the terminal.

"The factory line first, then." That led us east. The route cut through a bit of a maze of hallways. Avoiding all the patrols and locals made it an absolute slog. We spent an hour covering barely a mile of distance. A very annoying hour, too. We reached a long bay carved into the terrace wall where the floor printed its own spare parts. Drill heads. Cart wheels. Rail segments.

Racks of identical replacement components stood in rows under dead-eyed lens clusters, and in the middle of it all, fed by a glowing umbilical straight off the molten ore lines, sat the printer. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. It was the size of a bus. Deposition arms hung from a gantry over a scarred build plate, and the whole machine radiated heat and the smell of hot metal.

A conveyor ran from its output side across the bay to a recycling pit, and mounted over the conveyor, halfway along, hung a pneumatic hammer you could have hung in a cathedral. Defective parts rolled under it, got smashed back into scrap, and fell into the pit to be melted down and reborn as slightly less defective parts. People moved all over it, assisted by three floating drones. We stopped at a ledge overlooking the bay. I looked over the place.

"The terminal's behind the production line." Henrik glanced at Liu.

"I can handle the people. Can you eliminate the drones before they cause an alarm?"

"If the Dao wills it." He rolled his shoulders, stretching.

"On three." Henrik straightened, focused, and clapped his hands together.

"Sleep." He didn't count. A pulse of power blasted from him. Everyone around the factory line collapsed at once, instantly asleep. Liu bolted from his spot in a golden blur. He landed on the first drone with a golden blast, sending it crashing down while launching himself at the next one. He reached it in an instant, spinning mid-air, touching it with a palm. A golden wave burst from inside the drone, scattering its insides across the bay. Liu flew on, spun, and hit the last drone with a drop kick.

The impact caved in its head and torso, and it crashed to the ground alongside him. All clear. We moved to the production line, straight to the console. Henrik plugged himself in while Liu and I did our best impression of being useful. As he worked, I looked over the line.

"In the meantime, can you make it print swords? And send them straight to the pneumatic hammer to break them?" He stopped. They both looked at me.

"Surely you are prepared to answer the question," Liu said.

"For what purpose?"

"Need broken swords for my new summon." Henrik snorted. He swiped on the tablet for a bit, and the production line started moving. The robotic arms tossed ore into the smelter. Molten steel came out, poured into adjustable forms, which cast it into the rough shape of a sword. Not a pretty one, but nobody asked for master-crafted weapons. The forms moved through a cooling section, then the blades got reheated in the next smelter and quenched again farther down the line.

The heat-treated swords were fitted with rubber handles. Until finally, the line shoved them under the hammer, which snapped them in half. Perfect. I waited for it to build a bit of a pile, and then summoned Ashy. I pointed at the broken swords.

"We're taking those." She scanned me from head to toe and back.

"That might be the strangest thing you've asked me. Actually, never mind. It's the second strangest. Maybe third. It's fine." She skipped to the pile, touched what she could, and I unsummoned her. We repeated the process. From the corner of my eye, I watched the counter on the screen to make sure I had enough swords. After about a hundred and twenty, just in case, I said, "You can stop the line. I've got enough."

Henrik, slightly pale and highly focused, swiped on the tablet, and the production line finished what it had started, but stopped making new pieces. Liu leaned closer to Henrik.

"How is it looking on your end? By the flow of the qi, we will have company in fifteen minutes, and we cannot clean this place up enough not to cause an alarm." With a heavy sigh, Henrik pulled the connector from the terminal.

"Then let's go. We have to reach the main terminals at the headquarters. My attempts to break the network security have been unsuccessful. All communication goes from the center to the nodes, and this is a node. And the center does not read data from nodes often enough for my code injection to take effect." Liu rolled his eyes just enough that Henrik couldn't see it. We headed out. We entered a mined-out section, where an occasional drone loitered, as if hiding from work.

Liu disposed of those with calligraphic elegance. Next up was the long march through the fringe sections. Patrols rarely came through here, but it was a ten-mile trip through tunnels and ledges. Even without having to dodge patrols, it was quite the hike. Liu didn't show any sign of tiredness. I built up some pleasant sweat and was going to feel it tomorrow. Henrik panted, sweat gluing his clothes to his body, eyes burning with spiteful determination.

We finally reached a platform from which we could see the headquarters. It looked a lot like a fortress. Four levels, the lower ones swarming with people and machines, the upper ones under construction, crawling with cranes. The back of it pressed against solid rock, the whole building mostly metal, everything illuminated with floodlights. Hmm… We all stopped, staring at it. Henrik's glasses practically pulsed with scans.

"The Heavenly Dao does not seem to be in favor of stealth today." Yeah. This looked like a big fight waiting to happen. I glanced at Henrik.

"See any unguarded, secret entrances?"

"Nein. This is not good." Yushi floated feet first from the floor until her face hung level with ours.

"Not that anyone asked Yushi, but if you were to ask her, she would tell you there is no secret tunnel. She has checked thoroughly." Hmph.

"Where's the exit to the next floor?"

"Over there." She pointed to the side.

"If there was once a boss there, then nothing remains of it. I haven't seen any overseer or waystone either." Oh, so the tower literally couldn't send climbers here. Liu cleared his throat.

"Before our path ends the paths of hundreds of others, it might be wiser to complete our secondary objective. At the very least, having beacons on the border of the floors could prove most beneficial for us. Especially with only about an hour left on our timer." I stepped in that direction. The others joined me. I didn't want to spend the mana on that fight either. The path to the next floor was just a slope, as if it led out of the mine. And in a way, it did. The environment around changed.

The path led us onto a plateau. High above the plateau shone four suns. All of them orange, drenching the floor in light. On the plateau sat a massive base, made of scrap metal and makeshift construction, manned by a ragtag army of people. They wore all types of clothes, carried a wide variety of weapons, and looked like they could have been from any of the other floors. They had no checkpoint by the slope, only a gate up ahead. We walked to the side, and Liu started deploying the beacons.

There was no space for stealth to be used here. The entire base swarmed with people, but we couldn't blend in. Not unless we completely changed, which would require me to take off the cloak that made my floor timer infinite. The moment I took that off, my timer would restart, and I had no way of knowing whether at the maximum or the minimum. As I looked over the base, my eyes found a familiar shape. She stood by the window of the watchtower beside the gate, speaking with someone who looked like an officer. Peace.

My heart nearly stopped. It was her. With the crystal floating by her side, the shape of her gentle features was visible even at this distance. I sat down.

"In five minutes, prepare for war." I sank my consciousness inwards. I reached my soul chamber. I moved myself to Siegfried's chamber. I summoned Ashy, and in a blitz of summons and unsummons, I brought the hundred-odd broken swords into the soul chamber through her. I willed them into Siegfried's shape and pulled on the tattoo. He appeared out of nowhere.

"Yes?"

"No time to chat." I quickly finalized the statue and the bindings. The energies seared our connection into us. We already had the contract signed, so I just had to add the statue in. The engraving slots appeared in the pattern around the statue. One normal slot, one advanced slot. I put Quick Summon into the normal slot, mana efficiency be damned. I returned to reality, waking up where I sat. Liu still had a couple of beacons to place. I got up. Astarielle. Ashy. Siegfried. All three of them appeared.

The girls with their flames and flashes, Siegfried as if out of nowhere. Liu and Henrik both froze. For my demons, mostly Siegfried, I motioned at the watchtower.

"That woman with the crystal is named Peace. We are going to capture her. No matter the cost."