Chương 156: The Gate of Contrition

Santiago smirked as she watched Leo stare at the structure below. Bringing new flyers to the Gate of Contrition was her favorite part of the job. After all, Support Building G was pretty unassuming. Nothing about it indicated anything about the massive structure below. Most new arrivals froze when they first saw the Gate. Quite a few gasped with shock. A few had to sit down. The Gate was massive.

It was a perfect replica of the Obsidian Cult's fortress, copied stone by stone from reconnaissance data that had cost Earth dozens of lives. The fortress itself predated human civilization, and they had reproduced it in painstaking detail. Earth had held the surface of the Catacombs for decades. The real problem was what lay beneath. Miles of subterranean tunnels connected the surface to the caverns below, where the Cults built underground cities around Top Tier Spirit Veins.

And guarding those tunnels, at every major junction, sat a Gate of Contrition. The Gates were checkpoints. Fortresses built into chokepoints where the passages narrowed, designed to funnel any invading force into overlapping fields of fire. A single Gate could hold back an army. The Obsidian Cult had seven of them between the surface and their innermost sanctum. Seven fortresses that Earth would have to crack, one by one, if they ever wanted to reach the depths. And the military had been practicing.

Hangars lined the cavern walls, stocked with combat-ready flying swords. A destroyer sat in dry dock to the east, its hull swarming with maintenance techs prepping for another assault drill. Ammunition depots. Triage stations. Barracks built to house a thousand cultivators. Leo Chen had been so smug on the ride down. Dangling his Nascent Soul breakthrough technique like bait, watching her squirm, acting like he held all the cards. She had been looking forward to seeing his face. She glanced over.

What she found was strange. Leo's expression was solemn. Not awed. Not frightened. He looked like a man visiting a grave.

Leo thought back to Thad's words during their last meeting. She knows that someday you are going to kill her. When Leo looked out at the Gate of Contrition, he didn't see a fortress designed to hold back deities. He didn't see the technology or the military might arrayed against the Obsidian Cult. He saw a battlefield. And somewhere on that battlefield, in a future he couldn't escape, he would find Ella waiting for him. There is one relationship that is final. One thread that cannot be severed or redirected.

The karma between killer and killed. Leo had told himself he would find another way. He would bend fate until it broke. He would prove the future was unwritten. But standing here, looking at the replica of a gate deep within the Boston Catacombs, he could almost feel the karma between them tugging at his chest. Pulling him forward. Toward a moment he hadn't lived, toward a choice he was destined to make.

"So?" Santiago's voice cut through his thoughts.

"What do you think?" Leo turned. He faked a smile.

"This is incredible." He gestured at the cavern.

"You guys actually built a Gate of Contrition down here? The formation work alone must have taken years." Santiago's eyebrows rose.

"You know what it is?"

"I've seen one before. We passed through the Grey Cult's version, when we traveled to the Grand Formations Summit. Different aesthetic, same basic structure."

"Right." Santiago nodded slowly.

"I forgot you were part of that whole mess." She studied him for a moment longer than necessary. Whatever she saw, she decided not to push.

"Earth built this replica twenty years ago," Santiago said.

"We've held the surface of the Catacombs since the war started, but the Cult controls everything below. The subterranean tunnels. The High Tier Spirit Veins. The caverns below. Sooner or later, we're going to have to go down there." A horn sounded somewhere in the depths. Leo watched as figures emerged from staging areas carved into the cavern walls. Flyers on military-grade swords, moving in a tight diamond toward the replica gate. He counted twelve in the first wave.

"Drill's starting," Santiago said.

"Watch." The squad of flyers accelerated. They hit the gate's outer perimeter at combat speed, and the holographic projectors activated. Simulated flak erupted from emplacements built into the obsidian spires. The air filled with expanding spheres of light, each one representing a blast radius that would shred an unarmored cultivator. The flyers scattered, reformed, scattered again. Their movements were sharp and coordinated, the product of years of drilling against this exact scenario.

One flyer broke off and dove toward an emplacement. Two others followed, creating a three-person cell that moved as a single unit. The lead flyer drew fire while the wingmen flanked, and for three seconds they had a clean angle on the simulated gunner position. Then the counterfire caught them. Holographic explosions bloomed across all three flight paths simultaneously. The lead flyer's uniform lit up with damage indicators.

She pulled back, eliminated, and the remaining two scattered to avoid the follow-up barrage. Leo watched the remaining flyers regroup. Another cell formed, dove toward a different emplacement, and was shredded by overlapping fields of fire before they got within striking distance.

"You're planning on sending flyers against that?" Santiago glanced at him.

"What's the point of these drills?" Leo gestured at the carnage below.

"There's no way they can dodge hundreds of gun turrets. This is suicide."

"If we sent them in today? Yes." Santiago turned back to the glass.

"But this isn't really a combat drill. It's a technology testing ground." She pointed toward the destroyer in its maintenance berth. The vessel was three hundred feet long, its hull armored in overlapping plates of spiritual steel. Formation arrays covered every surface, glowing faint blue in the cavern's artificial light. Twin flak cannons jutted from the forward deck, and a dozen smaller turrets lined the sides.

"Brass has been throwing ideas at the Gate for years. Destroyers. Artillery platforms. Mobile shields. Some of it works. Most of it doesn't." Below, another wave of flyers emerged from the staging areas. This group moved differently, staying tight behind a floating platform that projected a shimmering barrier ahead of them. A prototype of some kind.

"However," Santiago explained, "flyers will be the ones who crack the gate. Earth doesn't have enough high-grade spiritual metal to build the number of destroyers we'd need to rely on them alone." She looked at Leo.

"Why else do you think there's such an emphasis on Flying Aces? The sport isn't just entertainment. It's a training pipeline." Her voice hardened.

"We've held the surface for decades. If we ever want to push deeper, take the fight to the Cults, we need hundreds of flyers who can survive a Gate run. And right now, we don't have them." Santiago's phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Your flight suit is ready." She nodded toward a door at the far end of the barracks.

"This way."

The equipment staging room was lined with racks of flight gear. Helmets with visors designed to filter spiritual interference. Flight suits in various sizes, each one tagged with a name and unit designation. A locked case along the far wall held a row of military-issue flying swords, their blades identical and unadorned. Santiago nodded toward the center of the room. A flight suit hung on an elevated stand. Military issue. Air Force insignia on the shoulders.

The fabric was dark gray, reinforced with spiritual threading that shimmered faintly under the lights. A name patch was stitched above the breast pocket. CHEN Leo stopped. He stared at the uniform for a long moment without moving. Ever since the Grand Formations Summit, he had sworn off the military. Sworn off the Catacombs. In Ashviel, the cults used the teams as bait to draw out a demon. Lord Perdue and the US military had been completely useless down there. They didn't let them withdraw or forfeit.

They just sent them to their doom. After the whole affair, Leo said he was done with the Catacombs, done with the military, and done with doing favors for the American government. The Catacombs and the high tier spirit veins within were someone else's problem. For the past year, he had managed to keep it that way. No deployments. No favors. No contact with the brass. And yet here he was. So why would the military grant him access to a classified installation? They hadn't even made him sign anything.

Now, looking at the flight suit with his name already stitched onto it, he understood. The military wanted to see what choice Leo would make. What he would do after being abandoned and left for dead in Ashviel. Whether he would pick up the uniform and put it back on. He could tell himself this was just practice. That he was tricking the military into giving him some reps. That after tonight he would leave and go back to the NFL and forget everything he saw down here.

But somehow he knew that putting on a uniform again wasn't that simple. It wasn't just a costume. He hadn't worn one since the Battle for Fort Cambridge. Wearing one today was a step he wasn't sure he was ready to take. Santiago stood by the door and watched in silence. Leo's mind drifted to a lecture from two years ago. Professor Vogt explaining the Three Talents formation back at Exeter. Heaven, Earth, Man. Leo had realized something that day. He didn't stand under one heaven. He stood under three. Earth.

The Azure Profound Continent. And the Catacombs. They were all part of him. He was part of them. He couldn't reject the Catacombs any more than he could reject his own cultivation. It wasn't something external that had been forced on him. It was part of his identity. Part of the foundation he had built his entire path upon. Someday his immortal path would draw him back to the depths below. That had always been true. Pretending otherwise was just cowardice dressed up as strategy. Leo took a deep breath.

He lifted the uniform off the stand and began putting it on.

After Leo put it on, Santiago walked him to the staging area in the main cavern.

"This isn't a full flight suit," she said.

"No armor integration. No defensive formations. It's mostly just a simulator interface, so the holographic systems can track your position and register hits." She glanced back at him.

"Try not to crash into anything real. The simulated flak won't hurt you, but the walls and the gate are solid. Hit one of those at speed and you'll be in the infirmary for a month." Leo nodded.

"What am I expected to do?"

"Command already knows what you want. They're interested in seeing if you can actually do it." They emerged onto a platform where a squad of twelve flyers was running through pre-flight checks. They wore the same dark flight suits as Leo, though theirs showed the wear of hundreds of drills. A coordinator with a tablet looked up as they approached.

"Wave Seven launches in three minutes," he said.

"Stay behind them. Don't interfere. If you get in their way, they'll fly through you." Leo drew Sunshifter from his dantian and waited. The squad leader called something Leo couldn't hear. The first four flyers mounted their swords and launched in a tight diamond, accelerating toward the Gate. The next four followed three seconds later. Then the final four. Leo checked his flight suit seals, mounted Sunshifter, and lifted off after them.

He kept twenty feet of distance, close enough to face the flak, far enough to avoid disrupting their coordination. Nobody acknowledged him. That was fine. He didn't want to be a distraction. The first salvo hit before Leo processed what was happening. Explosions bloomed across the formation's flight path. The military flyers scattered, each one sliding into gaps between the blasts that Leo hadn't even noticed existed. They reformed instantly, adjusted their angle of approach, and accelerated toward the Gate.

Leo tried to follow. His uniform lit up. He checked the damage indicator on his HUD. Fourteen points. Fourteen fragments had struck him in the space of two seconds, any one of which would have been a kill shot if he was unarmored. He kept flying. The formation dove toward a cluster of emplacements on the Gate's lower spires. Two flyers broke off to draw fire while the rest exploited the gap, and for three seconds they had clean air. Then the secondary emplacements rotated and the sky filled with explosions again.

Leo's uniform registered another eleven points. He was starting to understand the problem. In the NFL, flak evasion was a game of reading and reacting. You watched the gunners, anticipated their shots, and moved before they fired. Here the volume of fire made that approach meaningless. Even if Leo could read every emplacement perfectly, even if he could anticipate every shot with complete accuracy, there was nowhere to go. The blast zones overlapped. The military flyers knew this.

They moved as a unit, exploiting gaps that existed for fractions of a second, trusting their wingmen to draw fire at exactly the right moment. Years of drilling together had helped them learn to cover and support each other. Leo was an extra limb that didn't know where it belonged. His uniform hit sixty points before they reached the Gate's outer wall. The formation peeled off for another approach run, and Leo followed, and the flak caught him again and again and again.

By the time the drill ended, his damage counter had stopped updating. The display simply read ELIMINATED with a timestamp showing that he technically died forty-three seconds into the exercise. Across the cavern, another formation was lifting off from a different staging platform. Fresh flyers, fresh drill, fresh opportunity to get shredded. Leo reset his damage counter and launched himself toward the new formation to try again.

Twelve drills later, Leo finally admitted he needed to stop. The flight suit's biometric sensors had been flashing exhaustion warnings for the past hour. He descended to the recovery room adjacent to the main staging area. The space was utilitarian. Cots along one wall. Spiritual qi outlets along another. A few tables where military flyers sat eating ration packs and talking through the day's exercises. Leo found an empty cot in the corner and extended his divine sense into the nearest outlet.

He waited for the prompt to swipe his ID card. The qi started flowing immediately. Leo blinked. Every outlet he'd ever used required identification before dispensing. You swiped your card, the system logged the transaction, and someone sent you a bill at the end of the month. This one just gave free spiritual qi. Must be a perk of training here. Leo felt the energy spread through his meridians and decided he was going to take full advantage. He closed his eyes and focused on recovery.

The conversations around him blurred into background noise. Flight paths and timing windows. Formation adjustments for the next drill cycle. Someone complaining about the cafeteria running out of coffee again.

"Hey. Flyer Seven." Leo opened his eyes. A man in a flight suit stood a few feet away, holding a ration pack. He looked maybe thirty, though with cultivators that meant nothing. His squadron patch showed a stylized gate being struck by lightning.

"How's it going?" He sat down on the cot across from him.

"Learn anything useful?" Leo shrugged.

"I'm trying to learn how to dodge T4 shrapnel. I'm going to need hundreds of reps before I develop the instincts to do something useful. Maybe thousands. I'm not sure how long it's going to take."

"Good luck." He tore open his ration pack.

"How long are you staying down here?" The question made Leo pause. OTAs. Day two was tomorrow. He had been looking forward to the one-on-one combat drills. It would be a great chance to see how he stacked up against the veterans competing for the same starting spots. But he came all the way here to figure out how to accomplish the impossible. And he was going to see it through. OTAs were voluntary anyways. Hopefully Harbach wouldn't give him a hard time for skipping.

"I'm not sure," Leo said.

"I've got mandatory minicamp for the Giants in a few weeks, if I can't figure it out by then maybe I'll head back up so I don't get fined." The man nodded.

"Well, you picked a good week. Apex flyer coming in on Friday." Apex flyer. He'd heard the term before, back when he served in the Boston Catacombs. Soldiers liked to talk about secret capabilities the brass was hiding, and this one came up more than most. Publicly, military flyers were classified by combat output, not cultivation. A Gold Core flyer with standard equipment rated T4. One who'd mastered Third Person Perspective rated T4. 5. Technically, Leo was considered a T4. 5 flyer himself.

But the military didn't integrate talents like him directly into combat units. Foundation Establishment cultivators with enormous Si reserves were too valuable to risk. The brass preferred to let them develop in the NFL, building instincts in an environment where death was simulated. They would wait for flyers like Leo to max out their divine sense at a hundred thousand Si. Then they would help them step into Gold Core and turn them into Apex flyers No one knew what exactly an Apex flyer was.

No one had ever seen them in combat. There was speculation, of course. Enhanced formations. Experimental techniques. State of the art equipment. Leo had his own theories. On Friday, he'd find out if any of them were right.