Chương 226

Orion carefully slid down the slick incline, increasing his boots' grip on the cooling stone with a quick application of gravity magic. The pool of toxic slush had mostly disappeared, either carried off by the venting chimney or absorbed back into the deep earth. With it gone, the remains of a man were fully exposed, one that Orion was pretty sure had once belonged to the Iron State, even if the armor he wore had been worn down by the caustic pool, just like his flesh.

Approaching the body, Orion saw that he was right. The soldier was clad in the same brass-accented armor they had seen on the Beaked Peak, but the plating was badly buckled and damaged. The thick chest plate was completely caved in, and the helmet's reinforced visor was missing, revealing a grinning skull peeking through. He knelt beside the body, examining its condition for clues, and finally concluded that the scout hadn't been killed by a roaming beast.

The evenly spread concussive damage across the armor indicated a sudden compression consistent with the geyser they'd just observed.

"The moment the Silence mixed with the dense mana of the pool, the first pressure blowout crushed him against the rock. I doubt he even realized he was setting up his own death," he muttered, shaking his head. As far as deaths in the wild went, this was a relatively painless one, and it was hard to feel any pity for the man anyway, considering what he had come to do. Usually, they place the canisters where they could pollute the environment for miles, but this feels a bit different.

It might be that they just wanted to destroy a natural mana pool, since natural treasures can form there, but something tells me it's not that simple. He spent a few minutes looking around, just to make sure he wasn't missing any precious plant, but if there had ever been one, it was long gone now, its signature washed away by the geysers. Next, he examined the ruined armor, peering past the grisly remains to the equipment secured to the scout's harness.

The main crossbow had been shattered by the eruption, and the alchemical slugs were uselessly scattered in the slush, likely having added to the violence with their contents. However, tightly secured to a dark metal strap across the scout's chest and just beneath his armor was a cylindrical tube. Orion reached out and unclasped the device, wiping the gray grime from its casing. It was heavy, sealed at both ends with a series of complex, interlocking combination dials.

Etched into the brass alongside the dials were faint grooves designed for something to move through.

"Huh, he did have something useful," he said. He'd been more curious than anything, not believing anyone would make the mistake of leaving valuable intel lying around in a place like this, but considering the suddenness of the man's death, perhaps it wasn't so surprising, and the tube certainly looked resilient enough to have withstood the caustic pool.

There was a small reinforced-glass window near the base of the locking mechanism, through which a viscous, pale fluid sloshed sluggishly against a spring-loaded striking pin. Orion sighed as he recognized the hue. It was a variation of the volatile accelerant and Silence compound he had studied in the reactive armor plating, and he knew he was in for another day of hard work.

If the mechanical dials were forced or the wrong combination entered, the striker would break the glass partition, allowing the alchemical compound to flood the interior and incinerate its contents in alchemical fire. Considering that the damn thing was silence-based, there was no way to safely crack it open, even with spatial magic. No, it would need to be old-fashioned lock picking.

"Did you find anything?" Pauline's voice drifted down from the upper ledge.

"Yeah," Orion confirmed, slipping the cylinder into the void-silk bag.

"We're done here." He climbed back up to the main path, where Luna and Selene were watching over Dorian closely. Their friend was still unconscious, and although Luna's quick action had sealed the burns on his neck and shoulder, the shock from the Silence exposure meant he urgently needed proper medical attention. Still, the others let him wander around, and although he could sense their curiosity about what he discovered, he simply shrugged.

"I'll tell you once we're back," Orion said as they reached the spot where they left their broom. Luckily, they had the foresight to place them in a stone alcove, saving them from the geyser's effects.

"Slow and steady. We don't want to jostle him," he instructed as they mounted the brooms. Pauline disappeared into the shadows to scout their flight path, making sure no opportunistic predators would intercept them, while Luna and Selene adjusted their grip on Dorian, using minor levitation charms to lift the weight of his damaged armor, and a moment later, they took to the sky, leaving the scarred crevice behind. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road.

If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. The biting mountain wind offered little comfort during the return flight, and the distant, dark smoke rising from the Ironwood forest served as a constant reminder of the ticking clock they were racing against. When they arrived in the central courtyard of the Observatory, a team of medical witches immediately came to meet them. Orion thanked Pauline for sending a paper crane ahead, as his mind had been too preoccupied with the mystery of the cylinder.

They took custody of Dorian, levitating him onto a stretcher and moving him toward the specialized triage tents. Luna and Selene looked completely drained, but this time, they didn't seem willing to leave until they got an answer from him. Orion sighed but motioned for them to follow him, guiding them to a quiet spot where he displayed his loot.

"I found this attached to the soldier's remains." Despite how serious the situation was, Orion couldn't help but feel a little excited about the chance to crack another piece of Iron State technology. Luna, on the other hand, didn't seem all that impressed.

"What's that supposed to be?"

"Some kind of secure container," Selene answered for him, eyeing the artifact with interest. Considering the Silence within, she probably couldn't predict what it held, but it wasn't hard to deduce the normal way. Surprisingly, at least to Orion, the girls didn't appear very interested in joining his upcoming session and left suddenly, claiming they were too tired to stick around.

He eyed their retreating forms with a puzzled frown, then shrugged and left the courtyard, walking briskly toward the lab that Magistra Theresa had requisitioned for him. As he deactivated the wards at the entrance and stepped inside, he channeled mana into the heating systems and quickly banished the cold from his bones, silently thanking his mother for the upgrades. With a sweeping gesture of his hand and some telekinesis, Orion swept away the scraps of the reactive plating he had tested the day before.

He then placed what he was pretty sure was a dispatch tube under a bright glow-globe, pulled up a stool, engaged [Hypotheticism], and let his trait run wild. As it turned out, there wasn't much magic for him to study, but the lock was an impressive feat of engineering. The five rotating dials were connected to a central camshaft, and if the grooves were properly aligned, the cap would slide off smoothly.

If tension were applied to the cap while the camshaft was misaligned, it would cause a secondary gear to trigger the spring-loaded striker, breaking the glass vial of alchemical acid. As he anticipated, using brute force or spatial magic to shift its contents would activate the trap. The mechanism was too sensitive, and the danger that the silence within could interfere with a spell was too great, even for him.

"That just means I need to find another solution," Orion murmured.

"I believe I have a way, though, at least for the first part." Leaning closely over the tube, he focused his mana, creating a microscopic field of negative gravity. Instead of applying the spell to the dials or the cap, he projected the field directly inside the mechanism, targeting the spring-loaded striker itself. By reversing the gravitational pull on the small metallic pin, he effectively held it in place, fully neutralizing the spring's tension. The pin was now suspended in a localized spatial anchor.

With his left hand maintaining the precise gravity field, Orion grabbed the end cap of the brass tube with his right hand. He twisted it firmly, intentionally applying pressure to the misaligned camshaft. Inside the mechanism, the secondary gear triggered. The spring snapped forward, trying to drive the striker into the glass vial, but it didn't move even a millimeter, held perfectly still by the negative gravity.

Reassured that he was on the right path, Orion kept twisting the cap, forcing the internal gears to grind and slip until the locking mechanism finally gave way. With a metallic scrape, the cap popped off. He carefully maintained the gravity field on the striker, sliding the inner compartment out of the brass casing. Once the alchemical vial was safely separated from the firing pin, he released the spell, letting out a long, slow breath.

Inside the compartment was a tightly rolled bundle of thick vellum, a surprisingly archaic piece for the Iron State. Orion unrolled the documents, laid them flat on the worktable, and secured the edges with weights. The first sheet was a highly detailed topographical map of the Silvermount Range and the bordering Ironwood Forest, not falling short of the one used by Magistra Theresa, though smaller.

The second and third sheets were covered in neat, blocky text that was clearly ciphered, since it resembled no language Orion had ever seen in either of his two lives, and he'd spent quite some time studying runes. Still, the letters were in the common tongue, meaning that he just needed to find the key. XQMVZ LPTKR ANVZ BNYJS…

"A polyalphabetic substitution," Orion quickly deduced, recognizing the structural hallmarks of the code. The Iron State apparently used a system where the cipher alphabet shifted with each letter, based on a preset keyword, making simple frequency analysis difficult. Considering how dependent on magic almost every form of warfare was in this world, even that level of security was likely enough to stump nearly everyone.

Orion stifled a smile and closed his eyes, focusing on the Computing Crystal overlay in his mind. He might not have had the keyword, but he had plenty of raw processing power. He instructed the CC to run an index of coincidence on the text, analyzing the distances between repeated sequences such as XQMVZ to estimate the possible length of the keyword. The CC processed the strings of text in a split second, overlaying a glowing, semi-transparent matrix of statistical probabilities over Orion's vision.

"Alright, let's open this thing up," he muttered, grabbing a stylus and a blank sheet of paper. The process was fairly straightforward, involving dividing the ciphertext into seven separate columns, which effectively reduced the complex polyalphabetic code to seven simple Caesar ciphers. He assigned the CC to brute-force the vowel-frequency distribution in each column, comparing it to the language's standard linguistic patterns.

As the CC highlighted the most likely vowel shifts, Orion took over the manual translation and used his own pattern recognition to fill in the consonants, testing combinations based on military terminology. If LPTKR were a geographical marker and the first letter were 'R,' the word could be 'RIDGE.' Repeatedly, he recognized potential patterns and recorded them.

Working systematically, he wrote the decrypted letters underneath the cipher blocks, balancing the CC's computational output with his own linguistic intuition. Within thirty minutes, the main sequence of the code broke apart, revealing the keyword to be 'IRONCLAD'. Once that was finished, Orion quickly translated the rest of the document, neatly writing the plaintext onto his notepad. As the actual orders surfaced from the chaotic letters, the thrill of breaking the cipher was soon replaced by growing unease.

DEPLOYMENT OF CATALYSTS AUTHORIZED. TARGET COORDINATES: GRID 44-N, 12-W (SILVERMOUNT) GRID 47-N, 18-W (IRONWOOD BORDER) GRID 51-N, 22-W (DEEP CANOPY) With that knowledge, Orion looked back at the topographical map, cross-referencing the translated coordinates, and discovered that the first coordinate was exactly where he and his squad had just evacuated the crevice. He traced his finger to the second and third coordinates.

They were spread out across the map, deep in the forest and along the mountain base with the Adamantine Forge. Based on Pauline's earlier explanation of magical topography, Orion was pretty sure that every coordinate listed on the manifest corresponded to a major pooling of the Field. Fortunately, he didn't have to wonder for long why those places were chosen, because the next order explained everything.

"Primary mana pools must be neutralized to facilitate the advance of heavy armor. All scout units should prioritize deployment ahead of the main line."