While the boy prepared for the darkling swarm, far away in the other facility Drystan was sitting in one of the chairs inside the central control chamber.
His huge frame was hunched over the lens like key, tinkering with the mechanism with small and delicate instruments.
Fiora was sitting with her feet on the table opposite to him, sipping on a cannister of Vitarya. Her spear was resting against her chair at her side.
As Drystan adjusts some components inside the key mechanism, it ignites a flash and a few sparks. One of the sparking embers hits him in the face while smoke starts rising out of the mechanism.
Watching the scene, Fiora bursts out laughing.
“Hahahahahaha look at the big muscled brute fancying himself a tinkerer. Haaahahahahaha”
The laughing annoys Drystan.
“It was supposed to do that. For your information, that means it’s working.” He replies tersely.
“You’ve been saying that the entire day hehehehehe.” She answers back with a giggle.
Just when they had managed to enter the facility and make contact with Arya, the AGI running the lab, things had quickly gone downhill.
No matter what they asked, Arya had given them the same simple response.
“That information is classified.”
The key had worked on Arya and it had gotten her to recognize them as authorized personnel but some containment security measure was overriding all of their requests. The measure was designed in a way that even the highest authority, lord Alfzaar, would not be able to override it.
Apparently, there were intruders resting deep inside the different chambers of this facility and the security measure would only drop when they were expelled or eliminated.
After telling them what had to be done, Arya had dematerialized.
They didn’t know who the intruders were but as long as they weren’t darklings the request was simple enough to full fill.
If the intruders left of their own free will then that was that but if they required force to motivate them then that was also something they could arrange quite easily as well.
Their mission objective was far too important to risk over the lives of some random people.
Of course, after agreeing to Arya’s preposition to get rid of the intruders, when they were moving to unlock the door on the left side of the central control chamber, Drystan’s key had stopped functioning.
And so, for the entire span of daylight, while Fiora had gone back outside to survey the situation, Drystan had been trying to fix the key.
“I can’t believe we’re going to fail the mission because you have grand delusions of being a skilled artificer.” Fiora states, shaking her head.
“It’s not a delusion, I have actually received limited training as an artificer.” Drystan answers without taking his eyes off the mechanism.
He was holding two thin twig-like repairing instruments that looked like toothpicks in his giant hands.
Not wanting Fiora to continue taking jabs at him, he asks her a question to shift the conversation.
“Are they still out there?”
Her expression hardens at the question.
“Yeah, the dogs are still patrolling, you think they know what we’re up to?”
“They probably don’t, there was a lot lord Alfzaar kept close to his chest so there’s no way the council knows for certain, but they’re quite familiar with his nature and tenacity. They’re afraid they might’ve missed something.” Drystan remarks, still tinkering with his key.
“They weren’t afraid enough in the end, I still can’t believe that cowardly council suddenly got the balls to betray lord Alfzaar like that.” Spat out Fiora, her mood worsening from the subject of their conversation.
“It’s not about growing balls.” Said Drystan, finally looking up from the mechanism to meet her eyes.
“They were cornered. They were afraid of lord Alfzaar yes, but they were even more afraid of declaring war on the Celestial Union. It is their fear of the union that finally drove them to such a measure.” He explains, looking back down toward the mechanism.
“Even if we didn’t have our mission objective, I think they would’ve made something up to imprison us and all of lord Alfzaar’s loyalists.” He adds.
“Fuck those rotten yellow-bellied dogs!” She exclaims angrily.
“Did you see how many there were?” He asks again, this time trying to distract her from her growing anger.
She was even more of pain in the ass to deal with when she was angry.
“It’s hard to say, they don’t have any offensive military vehicles like a gravi-fighter, or a gravi-tank. Probably because they know those things won’t work against us at all. It’s just one type-C gravi-transporter, the one with enough capacity for 300 warriors. It’s hovering above the plains.” She reports.
“Since their mission is to find and track us, I think the actual amount of warriors might be less than that. Most likely, they have 150 warriors onboard and the rest of the space will be for gravi-bikes and surveillance tech.” he gives his opinion.
“Yeah some of them did have gravi-bikes…..if we had that kind of equipment then everyone would still be..”
She is interrupted by Drystan.
“Stop thinking like that. What’s done is done, focus on the objective.” He states calmly.
“But what if the objective is fucking dead? We never found anything and it’s pretty likely why that is. You think anything could survive out here in the night?” She protests.
“No, the objective is still on. We don’t have to find the specimen still living or even intact, securing a sample will be enough. Either we find that from the crashed ship that was carrying the specimen or we find the remains of the specimen itself. The ship already has the genetic blue prints for that specific stratus core, that’s what we need.”
“But what about the eyes? They were an important lazawal artifact.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that for now. Let’s focus on what is currently possible. We have to find the crashed ship before the council does.” He answers calmly.
“There’s no chance the council has the tech to track the stealth technology brought in by lord Alfzaar but that makes things harder for us as well. Are you sure this facility has what we’re looking for?”
“I am absolutely certain.”
The mechanism he was tinkering with suddenly comes to life, faint blue lines glowing along its edges.
Drystan stands up from his chair, looking at Fiora he states.
“I have it on good authority that lord Alfzaar’s consciousness was already stored before he was killed so all we need is the specimen itself. Best case scenario, we find the entire specimen intact but even if we don’t, we can secure the genetic material.”
“And if any darkling or council scum gets in our way, we butcher them.” She adds with a smile while grabbing her spear and standing to her feet.
“Exactly, now let’s go and see what kind of intruders are squatting inside this facility.” He replies with a smile of his own as he turns around to walk toward the door.
Fiora follows behind him.
Drawing near to the door on the right side of the chamber, drystan activates his key mechanism which scans the hidden panel in the wall beside the door.
Beside him, Fiora waves her palm in the air, materializing a holographic map of the facility Arya had provided them, similar to what the boy had in the other facility.
On the map there were countless red dots moving and scurrying about.
“I think there’s about a hundred, wait, make that a hundred and ten of them.” She tells Drystan.
“We’ve already wasted quite a bit of time, let’s try to clear them out in under an hour.” He states as the door lets out an affirmative beep before sliding open.
Readying their weapons, Drystan his sword while Fiora her spear. They step through the door and into the dim gray corridor in front of them.
The boy is standing in the white space of the gigantic containment chamber.
Infront of him, about 50 meters away, the entrance door into the chamber was rattling violently.
Even with the distance between him and the entrance, he could hear the high-pitched chittering and insectile hissing coming from behind the door.
Mixed within the darklings’ sounds was the dull creaking of metal as the door bent from their exerted pressure.
It wouldn’t be long before it finally gives way to the bugs.
It had taken them about 4 hours to break through the preceding doors to get to the entrance of the containment chamber.
During this time the boy had prepared his strategy with Arya.
He knew that the white shapes arched before the entrance were some security measures placed against darklings or intruders.
Arya had given him all the available information about them in regards to their capabilities, at his insistence of course.
Then there were the nozzles on the wide ceiling of the chamber, he had been right in guessing they were not there to spray water.
The nozzles sprayed a chemical that was diluted with very fine particles of aetherium. These aetherium particles were in turn charged with minute amounts of celestia aether.
When sprayed on a darkling, the minute celestia charged aetherum burned into their exoskeletons and scorched them from the inside out.
It might not kill them outright but it was perfect for incapacitating them. The best part was, aside from darklings it did not harm anything else.
The spraying mechanism had not been used in a very long time and there were some issues to be quickly sorted out.
Of course, he got Arya to solve all of them with her nano-tech, including cleaning the tiny openings of all the nozzles covering the chamber’s ceiling.
The problem was there was just enough chemical for a full burst that would last 15 seconds.
Since there were hundreds of small darklings, it would be a waste to just spray the whole chemical in a single burst, so he directed Arya to release small 3 second bursts at his signal.
This way they would be able to fire the nozzles 5 times, allowing them to hit the later preceding waves as they enter the chamber.
For this to work he had to be in constant communication with Arya, and to make that possible she had clumped a bunch of her nanobots together to produce an earpiece that he was currently wearing in his right ear.
As the preparations neared the end, he had directed her to break into Alfzaar’s terminal. The thing was highly encrypted but according to Arya it did not stand a chance against her.
The only reason why she had never done it before was because she had no authorized access to mess with anything in Alfzaar’s chamber.
Good thing his permission acted as well as Alfzaar’s direct authorization.
By the time the approaching swarm is taken care of, he will have more secret information to go through.
Looking at the creaking entrance door, he walks over to the defensive arch of the security drones.
He readies his sword for the upcoming conflict, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly.
There was a reason why he wanted to be a part of the action.
Once he found out how the stratus core functioned, it was only natural he tries to raise his level as much as possible.
He had to become strong quickly if he wanted to continue surviving.
From everything he learned about this universe, it was clear that the darklings were only the beginning of his problems.
Judging from how much his genetic material matched with the ruler of this planet Alfzaar, it was only a matter of time until he faced more trouble.
He adjusts the lens in his right eye that Arya had given him. It was a scouter that read the stratus level and average aether count of the enemy, whether person or darkling.
“There is one major way to gauge the strength of your opponent and that is through a scouter. It can instantly read the aetherial aura covering the enemy and display its Stratus level and Avg Aether count. The avg aether count is the net avg of all the combat sections of a being’s aether except for Hiphara (HP) and Mana (MP). Needless to say, the higher the level, the higher the avg aether count.”
“So I can get a rough estimate of their stats, except for their HP…I mean Hiphara and Mana.”
She had agreed while twirling in the air.
“It takes a lot of time to conduct a detailed analysis of a stratus core. With your core it was only possible because the facility’s nano tech had been reading it the whole time. In combat situations its simply not possible. So the empire’s military relies on the stratus level and avg aether count to gauge strength. Average aether count especially comes in handy as sometimes the opponent’s stratus level may be low but their aether may be abnormally high. Not all stratus cores are the same quality wise, some are naturally better at absorbing aether than others.”
Is what she had said.
Although not as descriptive as he was hoping, since the scouter combined the values of ATK, DEF, INT, RES, ACC, and SPD it could give a rough estimation.
Of course, he had another option as well. Through his eyes he could directly see the density and volume of the aether enveloping his opponents’ bodies. They could pick up where the scouter was lacking.
“I’m standing by for your signal lord Alfzaar, let me know when to spray the chemical.” Arya’s voice buzzes in his ear.
“Roger, copy that.” He notes.
“Uhm I’m sorry what are you copying lord Alfzaar?” She inquires with a confused tone.
“*sigh* Nothing Arya, it’s an expression. It means I understand.” He answers.
“Oh, well I copy it too then, roger.” She replies.
He was about to correct her when suddenly the chamber’s entrance door snaps and begins to tear apart, barely holding together in place.
Out of the torn gaps, sharp legs and pointed claws extend through. He could make out fast scuttling figures behind the gaps.
The door lasts for a few more moments before the door abruptly snaps, succumbing to the intense pressure.
A large hole tears open at the center with enough force to shoot out metallic fragments in a wide spread.
All the chittering and hissing immediately stops, and everything becomes quiet and still.
The boy stares at the gaping darkness inside the hole, trying to make out the shapes.
Just as suddenly as how everything had gone quiet, countless darklings start pouring out into the chamber from inside the dark, moving with unnerving coordination.
The eight security drones beside him come to life and their smooth polished surfaces split open to make way for their energy rifles.
The drones silently rise up in the air, propelled by their anti-gravity mechanisms. Charging aether into their energy rifles, they aim their barrels toward the incoming swarm.
The boy takes his stance, his eerily glowing sword ready in hand.
“And so, it begins.” He says softly, mimicking the dialogue from one of his favorite movies back on earth.
