Chương 45: Chapter 1 — Business as Usual

It wasn't every day that a titan rescued a town. The armored figure was a massive fifteen feet tall, clad head to toe in heavy armor and wielding a poleaxe twice its size, the blade alone the length of a man. The Platinum-rank World Elites – all four of them – assaulting the merely Silver-ranked town never had a chance. The other aspiring Gold-rankers, nowhere near up to the task, huddled at the town center, maimed and exhausted, as the titan smashed through the monsters.

It wielded both weapon and magic, moving far faster than anything of that size should and hewing straight through the final wave of the rank-up quest. That massive poleaxe punched through a roaring, six-legged beast in a ripple of purple aether, opening a gaping hole in its body and leaving it to bleed out as silvery-grey gravity magic orbs tugged an armored elite out of position. It windmilled as it tried to keep its balance, only to be cut in half when the titan blurred past.

The titan shifted its grip on the great weapon as it launched itself into the air, a prodigious leap that brought it down on the armored back of a razor-mouthed, long-legged beast and drove the poleaxe blade through the spiked skull. Movement Skills flashed as the titan crossed to the other side of the town with one swift motion, confronting the final Elite. It was even larger than the titan, an armor-clad, four-armed monster with a flaming scimitar in each hand and lava dripping from its fangs.

The titan dodged the fiery slashes with an easy grace and brought the massive poleaxe around to crush the monster's helmet. The sound wasn't so much a metallic ring as a tortured screech, the sturdy helm caving in as the strike instantly killed the monster. The quest finished, solely thanks to the efforts of the towering figure, with the town left miraculously whole and intact.

Relieved Coppers and Silvers watched from the buildings in both fear and awe as the titan strode through the town, ducking into the Nexus and touching the crystal there. It did not speak to the failed aspirants, or to those within town, merely vanishing and leaving behind the corpses of the monsters that would have destroyed it. Within the titan, Kess Miche, née Leese Sekhel, stepped back in a purely virtual way and let Raine pilot it alone.

With the disappearance of the Sydean Lineage, nobody was willing to move to Bismuth, and so there was a need for something that could mimic that level of power. There had been a lot of ideas and testing over the years, which had ultimately resulted in what Cato had dubbed the Jager Frame. It was, ultimately, controlled jointly by Raine and Leese, though either of them could step back into a miniature aestivation, or transmit themselves back up to proper infrastructure above.

Yet when they both linked into it, the massive frame had the benefits of two people's worth of System enhancements — getting that right was what had taken the longest time. Generally, Raine focused on the actual martial combat, and Leese had high-powered amplification and support Skills, but both sets of Skills applied to the combined body. They were, effectively, cheating the System, creating builds that would never have been possible for two separate people.

It just wasn't possible for someone to forego the usual Skill balance and still survive Conflict Zones or dungeons. But Leese hadn't taken a single movement Skill, while Raine had four. The combined body appraised as a conjoined identity, which nobody, not even Yaniss, had ever heard of. Yet it turned out that the System had accommodations for such a thing that, through trial and error, they had managed to fulfill. So the titan was Kess-Imel, a double-Peak-Gold Jager — or rather, now double-Fresh-Platinum.

They certainly stood out, but were so far different from anything anyone would be looking for that it was worth a bit of risk. Besides, only a small percentage of Lineages had even wanted a Jager, as there were on few instances of Raine and Leese who were interested in ranking up to Peak Platinum. That was the minimum needed to push through to the inner worlds, which were considerably more rarefied than the frontier.

The core worlds themselves might be off-limits, but there were still hundreds of worlds where visitors below Platinum were not welcome — and acceptance of Platinum rank travelers was grudging at best.

"Should we go through now, do you think?" Leese asked, re-engaging and giving Raine a moment to take a break. Which wasn't strictly necessary, but it was nice to take a moment away from the odd combined gestalt of Raine, Leese, the conjoined frame, and high-powered combat algorithms. The Jager frame was something to pilot, not to be.

"We'd better run at least one dungeon," Raine replied, stretching virtually before engaging with the Jager frame again, steering it – for it couldn't quite be called walking, strange as the combined control was – toward an inn. Of course, they had to adjust their Skills before they did anything, but Raine didn't think that any fresh Platinums would be able to move around in any of the inner worlds without being harassed.

They could hold their own, especially given the power of the Jager frame, but it just wasn't worth the trouble.

"I wish the dungeons around here were more interesting," Leese muttered, sorting through her Skills. Raine had to agree. Compared to some of the deeply scripted offerings from Cato's games database, the System dungeons were just combat slogs. At least so close to the inner worlds, with so many high-rank areas, they didn't have to waste their time plodding through remote Zones just to find a singular Bismuth dungeon. They had outgrown Platinum-rank dungeons before finishing Gold rank.

Raine considered her own Skills. They'd gone with the most esoteric combination they could think of, Aether and Gravity, partly for the fun of it and partly because few people had experience dealing with those elements. Monsters and beasts didn't usually have any real defenses against them, making the already powerful Jager frame even more effective. She started by just pushing up the top eight skills; three offensive, four movement, and one sensory, split between Platinum and Gold ranks.

Copper kept the basic skills like [Clean] and [Appraise], while Raine stuffed some additional self-enhancement Skills into the newly-opened Silver rank slots. They had more than enough Skill tokens. With so many versions of themselves delving so many dungeons, there was a surplus for anyone who needed high-quality loot, and some of the instances had even gotten into crafting.

The Crafting skills were of marginal use at that rank, but being able to completely customize tokens and accessories meant that with everything available their Jager frame had started out with A-tier Skills and a full kit of equipment. The dungeon didn't take them long, despite its enormous size. The algorithms didn't need them to even finish the first floor for full calibration to the new level of power.

They didn't even need to upgrade their gear; not that there was any point in taking the time to fully equip what was ultimately a disposable asset, and with their Skills and the absolutely stunning power of the Jager they blew through the other floors in only a few days. Once, that would have been an incredible feat, something to marvel at, but after decades of practice Cato and the Lineages had it down to a fine science.

Cato had been working just as hard as Raine and Leese, even if he didn't spend any time down on the surface of any of the System planets. There was enough to do testing different bioweapons and frames, digging ancient and obscure genetic engineering projects out of what seemed to be an endless set of databases, or just managing the ever-expanding industrial infrastructure that sprawled through the outer reaches of every solar system they colonized.

One of the fruits of all that effort was the Jager-sized Cato-spear. It was actually several dozen tons, twice the size of the Jager frame itself, and had everything necessary to turn into a very small spaceship without any additional mass. Something that they had found necessary, as none of the inner worlds had moons. Or rather, any moons they had were inside the System's aegis. Only a few frames had gone to the inner worlds to distribute a new Cato, but they'd all found the same thing.

Even if there had once been moons, they were gone. Absorbed, or in some cases brought down to create some massive new dungeon or Conflict Zone on the surface of their respective planets. Lacking any nearby anchor, all of the Cato-spears had to embark on a years-long journey to one of the other mass concentrations in the solar system. She would have said planet, but asteroid belts worked just as well for a staging area. Or even less well-defined clumps of matter; anything with at least some volatiles and metals.

"Right, Cato, we're headed through," Raine sent as the now Low Platinum titan approached the portal to the inner worlds. There weren't many of them, and they were spaced widely, with at least a hundred worlds between each. The chokepoints had actual security on them, deep inspections from both the System and higher ranks, even years after the last obvious activity.

"Stay safe!" He broadcast back, and the titan frame stepped through the portal. Immediately, they could feel multiple senses and System constructs practically peeling their skin off, sweeping through them in ways they couldn't hope to stop. Though that was exactly the reason they were so very far from anything associated with Cato, and no checkpoint had more than one Jager frame go through.

Thanks to Initik they knew that the gods did not communicate all that much, but that only made the risk of a few frames manageable. More than that was certain to draw attention. Ironically, a direct interrogation would have been much tricker to pass. They had made planetfall on an obscure Hunting World, but it would have been a lot more difficult to convince anyone they were of natural origin.

Difficult, but not impossible; the System's sheer scale and variety of options meant that their existence was at least plausible. She and Leese ensured they showed no particular fear or anxiety, leaning into the cold calculation of the combat brains and pretending to ignore the sudden attention as they strode forward to check in at the map and quest pylons. It was a normal enough behavior, but they weren't looking for a place to stay and dungeons to delve.

They were looking for a remote point from which to launch Cato's spear and a passable reason to be there. The titan pulled up the map and studied it, unwelcome attention fading away. With the augmentations they had, it was only a matter of seconds to memorize the local map and add it to their database. If they were normal Platinums, there would be few places appropriate for them — and ones likely controlled by the local clans.

Raine steered the Jager frame out into the city, taking note of the broad, colorful streets and towering buildings. The opulence of the greater clans was obvious in the sheer, riotous selection of aesthetics. In fact, it was to the point where the reds and greens and blues became garish, each of the System buildings competing with each other.

Raine was reminded of some of the bits of earth history they'd lived through via aestivation – one of the hobbies she'd picked up with Leese, after learning how profoundly different people could be outside the System – where wealthy people demonstrated their status by agglomerations of sheer stuff without regard for taste. Outside the city was the [Zoek Valley Border Zone], recommended for Low Bismuth, but not even slightly a threat to the Jager frame.

They easily cut down several overly-aggressive creatures, which had size on their side but nothing else, and fished out a FungusNet nodule from one of the pouches around the frame's waist. They didn't yet have a spatial storage that allowed living things, so the fungus balls had to be carried manually, but that was easy enough given the sheer size of the frame.

They seeded the region with a number of nodules under the guise of hunting down some of the creatures requested by the most basic of the available quests, sweeping through the towering forest only a few miles outside of the city. Of course, the frame's relatively low rank didn't go unnoticed, and the augmented senses built into the Jager tracked two Bismuths stalking the frame for half a day.

"I wish they'd just get it over with," Raine complained to Leese.

"Odds on robbery versus eviction?"

"Probably pretty even," Leese sent back. Plenty of higher ranks, even at Bismuth, preferred to stomp on the lower ranks. Anyone rising too fast was a threat, to be removed before they became too powerful. For the most part the two of them had avoided that simply because they'd done all their leveling away from towns, and far more quickly than anyone would believe, but other Lineages had run into the attitude more than once.

They decided to see what their pursuers wanted after planting a fifth FungusNet seed, something easily concealed as they extracted the teeth and claws of some sort of furry centipede, albeit one that was twice the size of their frame. Instead of moving on, they turned to face where the nearest Bismuth was, planting the haft of their spear on the ground and waiting. It took a good fifteen seconds for the Bismuths to move, which spoke volumes about the intelligence of their stalkers.

Though as Cato had already observed, people that reached Bismuth weren't necessary very smart, just very good at fighting. The pair of them sauntered into view, both of them from the same species. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. [Rish Cuy-mil. Low Bismuth.] [Moshk Cuy-mil. Low Bismuth.] They were what Cato would call humanoid, purple-skinned with coarse, pebbled skin and greasy-looking purple hair barely covering low-slung ears.

While Raine and Leese found most non-Sydean species various brands of strange, some few were outright unpleasant, and Clan Shoak was one of them. It didn't help that the pair swaggered up as if they were impressive, a posturing that fell flat when the Jager frame was three times their height and probably thirty times their mass.

"You're pretty big for a freshie," Rish sneered, planting hands on armored hips and peering up at the frame's helmet-obscured face.

"I swear, it's like he's watched some of those terrible movies," Leese sent, far more amused than anything.

"Pitch perfect high school bully."

"They've probably been stuck at Low Bismuth for ages," Raine opined.

"Not smart enough to make the transition to more complicated encounters or figure out Domains."

"And that's a lot of fancy gear," Moshk said, completely unaware of the silent byplay.

"Bet that cost a lot of tokens."

"We're being robbed!" Leese sent with glee.

"Does a Bismuth even need Platinum tokens?" Raine wondered.

"I mean, we have Bismuth tokens too, but they can't know that."

"Very fancy," Rish agreed.

"I bet you're a really good Platinum. But we're Bismuth, so you ought to pay homage to your elders and hand over what you've got."

"No." The Jager frame's voice was deep and hollow, produced by something more like a syrinx than vocal cords. It wasn't absolutely necessary, but the sepulchral tones added to the general air of menace that the huge frame produced.

"No? He said no," Moshk said, elbowing Rish.

"Then we'll just have to show him how bad an idea it is," Rish said, pulling out a sword covered in darkness while Moshk conjured flames in his hands. The pair moved forward in an eye-searing blur, powerful energies ripping apart the spot where the frame had stood only a moment before. The conjoined powers of the Jager frame really were cheating. [Ethereal Step], a short-range teleport, chained into [Flowing Steps of Ghoruscan], a more sustainable aether movement Skill which let them flit around the battlefield.

[Passage of Ghoruscan] created portals at the same range as [Ethereal Step] while [Ghoruscan's Jaunt] gave her an extremely long-range option on a longer cooldown and at greater cost — and those were just the movement Skills. Leese's gravity orbs shot out around them, creating a wildly varying battlefield as they shifted position and intensity apparently at random. Except every detail was designed to aid the frame's movement, and stymie the opponent's.

It didn't have nearly as much effect on a Bismuth as it had on Platinums, but in a fight even a small annoyance could multiply into something deadly. The enormous spear thrust forward at Rish, who hastily parried it with his own shadow-infused sword. The difference in rank meant that, despite all the force behind it, he didn't instantly crumple under the blow — though it was obvious that he wasn't expecting a Platinum to hit so hard, so fast.

The frame had speed multipliers from boots, the growth weapon, and several accessories, while breastplate, cloak, and more accessories provided multipliers to strength. Crafted items gave just a percent more to each, but those percents added up. Considering the breathtaking physical capabilities of the frame's base form, and the support Skills Leese supplied, they hit more like upper Bismuth than lower Platinum.

Then Leese triggered the syrinx and screeched one of the worst sounds from Project Cringe directly into Rish's face. It wasn't an actual attack, the sound was at normal volume and couldn't damage the ears of a Copper, let alone a Bismuth. But it was so horribly, viscerally unpleasant to hear that Rish flinched backward. Which was a mistake, as a [Passage of Ghoruscan] redirected a heavy spear-thrust into the distracted Shoak-Clan's midsection.

Flames enveloped the frame as Rish screamed, but Raine and Leese shrugged them off. Non-esoteric energies were of little concern, which was why they had gone after Rish first. Between the native toughness of the frame, an overabundance of resistance Skills, and the extra multipliers from crafted equipment, even a Bismuth's fire was barely an inconvenience. [Rippling Spearwork] tore through Rish's flesh in the strange half-ethereal manner of aether Skills.

He vanished with a blip; not a Skill activation, but some kind of life-saving item. Those sorts of things were available to Bismuths and above, and while the assailant escaping was an irritant, it wasn't some looming future problem. The Jager frame didn't care about making enemies. It could be discarded easily enough, as the only bottleneck to reaching Platinum was finding a defense quest — and with Cato's now-expansive surveillance network, spread over tens of thousands of worlds, that was fairly simple.

If Rish decided to hunt them down in the future for the temerity of not dying when attacked, he'd find himself disappointed. Moshk's flames strengthened, and Leese invoked additional defensive Skills as Raine repositioned, [Flowing Steps of Ghoruscan] carrying her straight through the flames toward Moshk. Yet as their spear whistled down, he vanished into fire, the conflagration around them turning into a vast infernal wheel of flames, spreading miles in every direction.

The Bismuth ability to simply transform, turning into an element, was something that couldn't be overcome with brute force. Which didn't mean that the Jager frame was helpless. Even through the thick wall of flames, the combat algorithms could integrate what their various senses, and sensory Skills, did pick up, and Skills could still affect those maintaining an incorporeal form.

They bounded through the fire, pushing past the heavy post-Bismuth essence that gave the flames a physical heft, as Leese's gravity orbs swept through an ever-so-slightly denser concentration. Part-attack, part-distraction, the tearing distortions of the gravity orb threw Moshk off-balance enough for Raine to send the frame leaping up, aether rippling along their spear as Raine brought it around for a heavy slash. The blade ripped through the flame-form Moshk, suddenly forcing him out of his Skill.

He fell to the ground, spitting black-red blood, but before he could invoke his own emergency teleport, Leese's gravity orb redirected the frame downward. They slammed into Moshk, an aether-clad weapon backed by several tons of frame traveling downward far faster than simple gravity would allow.

The impact by itself wouldn't have done much to a Bismuth, but the aether empowerment let it slide past the Bismuth's usual defenses, and combat algorithms ensured that the point of the poleaxe hammered home right where the neck joined the shoulder. The weapon spitted Moshk from neck to hip, but even that wasn't enough to kill him. It merely stunned him for a moment, long enough for Raine to pull a second, smaller spear from their storage and ram it through Moshk's eye.

Only then did the System inform them of their victory. [Bismuth-rank Clan Shoak defeated. Essence Awarded]"We'd better go send out a Cato before that other guy causes trouble," Leese said, not even bothering to celebrate. Neither of them particularly enjoyed killing, and the experience of being accosted was more novel than actually dealing with it.

"Yeah." Raine steered the frame back to the city, not even bothering to check the body for useable gear, and headed directly for the Nexus. Without so many watchers, they felt safer taking the teleportation pylon to one of the moons. The small town there was technically in an Azoth zone, which made them exceedingly out of their depth, but they had no desire to actually engage with any of the monsters there.

Instead, they went straight up, [Flowing Steps of Ghoruscan] bringing them up to the edge of the atmosphere and beyond. Nobody paid attention to them; even in the inner worlds, Azoths were infrequent enough that most of the Azoth zones were unpopulated, the outpost town at its most basic level. It was obvious that the moon and its associated Zones were new to the System; a relic of Muar's campaign. That had been easy enough to learn about, even if they had no idea where Muar was now.

They withdrew the massive, industrial-sized Cato transporter, and with muscle and Skills hurled it out into the blackness beyond. They didn't need to worry about an exact trajectory, as even with Cato's augments they couldn't meaningfully target something as far away as another planet. The twenty-ton caisson vanished into the sky, and Raine turned the Jager frame around. The job was done, at least for this planet. Onto the next.

Time wasn't a constant for a digital being. Cato-Uriv was perhaps the only version of Cato that hadn't felt the need to underclock for the entire last decade. Even if he didn't reconcile with his other selves too much, he still got the abstract memory updates from them. For most, once startup was finished and a few, or few dozen, new planets had been seeded, there was little to do but let the automated factories work.

Which meant that Cato-Uriv was the oldest of his peers, and in some ways the de facto leader — though that was hardly an accurate word. All the various versions of him were him, so each instance would be on roughly the same page and didn't need to be given orders — nor would they take them.

But for those who spent most of their time underclocking, somewhere in an aestivation, or otherwise away from the business of dealing with the System, Cato-Uriv was their better judgement, their emotional connection to the ultimate goals they had, solely by exposure. Unfortunately, he was also his own better judgement, which meant that for the umpteenth time he had to stop himself from calling up Initik and asking the Urivan System-god to look into the core worlds.

After the reports from the Jagers it was obvious that, powerful as the frames were, making inroads to the inner worlds required someone at a higher rank — like the Sydean Lineage. He hadn't heard from or about either that pair or Dyen for a little over ten years, but that didn't mean he could write them off. All of them were immortal, and from what Yaniss said the war-worlds of the core were the size of Jupiter.

Locating people who might be lost or imprisoned or holed up in some fortress somewhere took time, in such circumstances.

"Everything looks good," said Leese Uriv the Elder, who was doing the heavy lifting for the Urivan genetics project in digital space. Leese Uriv the Younger was, on the other hand, doing the heavy lifting for the Urivan youths, embodied on the station and dealing with the actual physicality of the Urivan project. So far as Cato knew the two didn't talk, any more than any of the other varying Lineages, but they were collaborating.

"Unfortunately, it'll still be another couple generations before we can be certain we've fixed all the problems," Cato sighed. It would have been nice if they could just rely on simulations, but they didn't have anywhere near the information to rely on digital recreations. Base reality had all kinds of wrinkles that couldn't be automatically known without a lot of grueling detail work.

"We might end up with an entire population of spacefaring Urivans," Raine Uriv the Elder said, only half-joking. She was out somewhere in the black, jetting around the binary gas giants as she personally checked up on the enormous amount of infrastructure. Like Leese the Elder, she was running support for her counterpart, both of them dealing with the ever-present issues of expanding and maintaining infrastructure.

That doing so meant both Younger and Elder had an excuse to go flying around in various over-engined craft was not at all coincidental, and Raine the Younger had even started building additional habitats around Uriv's moons.

"It's possible," Cato agreed, also only half-joking. Uplifting was a tricky subject, one with no good answers and a lot of very harsh lessons, but it was always easier with a small group. By the time the genetics issues had shaken out, the Urivan group might well be conversant enough with technology to be their own separate civilization. That was a consideration for far later, however, and he had hopes that he'd get insight from other versions of himself by then.

A number of the cut-off worlds were only a few light-decades away, so he'd put together comms arrays in every single system, waiting and listening for each of those disconnected planets. If nothing else, the versions of himself and the Lineages on all the sterilized worlds, the ones murdered by the System, would probably want to transmit themselves out if possible.

Other versions, though, would have been uplifting – or trying to uplift – and fix the biospheres and civilizations of freed worlds, and he would be getting those updates in a steady stream once the signals finally crossed the distance. Cato had an enormous wealth of records in his databases, but ones specifically about ex-System types would be even more useful. Or maybe they'd find it just as intractable as he did, but he could always hope. The process wasn't all hard choices and drudgery, at least.

In the orbital habitat, thirty Urivan men and women were raising an equal number of children, and while tiny insect children didn't quite have the neonatal features required for Cato to find them cute, the obvious joy on the part of the parents and nurses was heartwarming. As was the fact that, thanks to the genetic tweaking, they'd lost none of the mothers. Which wasn't to say there hadn't been some moments of panic for Raine and Leese the Younger.

Despite a thorough analysis, the precise form of the failure cascades writ deep into Urivan biology were impossible to know until the event. Nature was cruel and unforgiving, but Cato had the tools to hold off her demands. The version of him on the Urivan station mostly watched from afar, leaving the onboarding and education to Raine and Leese, along with a bevy of virtual-intelligence interfaces — upjumped chatbots with access to certain databases or commands. But that didn't meant he didn't care.

Obviously it was important to convince Initik about the virtues of non-System life, but Cato also hated how Urivans, like every other race within the System, had no unique culture. No real concept of art or music, writing or dancing, and certainly no traditions of their own. Yet in a grassy field with a view of the stars, a small circle of Urivans were having an impromptu musical session. It was very simple, just some drums and quick-fabbed metal bars to make a few sets of chimes.

There were plans for more complex instruments, if the Urivans had wished to find them, but there was no point to just copying someone else's work. They were creating something of their own. Small and simple as it was, that was a tremendous step. Not just for the Urivans, but for Cato's plans in general. Taking down the System had never just been about destroying it as a threat, even though it was a damned big threat.

He had to spite it by actually saving those within, and not just in the sense of maintaining living bodies. There were thousands of races – tens of thousands – that had been flattened, constrained, diluted. Their pasts erased, their identities forced into the tiny box the System allowed. There had been no way to tell whether it was even possible for any of them to reach beyond the results of so many generations laboring under that immense weight.

Civilization was a long and difficult road, with fewer shortcuts than most would hope. But the Urivan project showed that what made people unique, what made them thinking beings and not just mindless psychopaths of destruction, still existed below the crushing tyranny of the System's reality. Not that people were automatically good without the System, but at least they had options. The road to destroying the System was still a very long one.

Even ten years later, there were frontier worlds he hadn't yet reached, and the inner worlds were extremely tricky, let alone the core. But seeing some success was a massive relief, and helped him face the tremendous task anew. He could see a future after the System.