Chapter 60 - Ink and India Ink

The Fourth Division Military Outpost occupied a square reinforced-concrete fortress flanked by iron guardhouses at each corner along the eastern boundary of the Third District.

The quartermaster captain, a cybernetic demon wearing dark spectacles with his right arm sheathed in polished bronze plating, examined the forty-five-pound ferrite core resting on the spring scale with an ether probe.

The tool let out a high-pitched whine as its copper probe brushed the raw mineral, verifying the Tier Three purity of the felled carcass.

The officer asked no questions about how three young hunters had torn that core from the guts of Conduit Seven without a support battalion. He took permit number forty-two, struck the red quartermaster seal across the completion voucher, and unlocked the wall safe recessed behind his desk.

He counted out one hundred and twenty hundred-scrip Central Bank notes before Dante's eyes, bundling the sum into twelve equal stacks bound with black rubber bands.

"Twelve thousand scrip in legal tender." The captain slid the money across the brass counter. "The contract is closed on the quartermaster's ledger."

Dante packed the entire sum into his heavy canvas satchel without celebration.

They left the military outpost and caught the elevated tram straight to the Anvil Sector.

The purchase of the greatsword at Korgan's smithy was swift and free of haggling.

Dante laid forty-five hundred-scrip notes across the shop's central anvil.

The four-armed blacksmith scooped up the currency, checking the purple ink stamps with a satisfied grin, then pulled the black boiler steel greatsword from the tempered glass case, setting the weapon into Maria's hands alongside a wire-reinforced vulcanized canvas scabbard.

The new blade measured over six and a half feet in overall length, weighing exactly forty-eight pounds of continuous fire-forged iron.

The dark steel held a bluish sheen under the arc lamps, its full tang three fingers thick tapering into a solid iron pommel.

Maria gripped the extended hilt with both wrapped hands, stepped into the smithy's back courtyard, and loosed two compact vertical cuts through the air.

The displacement of mass kicked up a deep hum that blew the soot on the ground into a wide circle.

"Flawless balance," she said, satisfaction shining in her brown eyes. "All the weight sits right at the cutting edge."

She sold the old forty-pound sword back to Korgan for four hundred scrip in scrap value, cinched the new weapon's harness across her brigandine cuirass, and strode out of the workshop with heavy steps that set the sidewalk plates rattling.

......

The double timber doors of townhouse forty-two were barred with the cast-iron crossbeam at ten-thirty in the morning.

The rain outside had died down, leaving only the distant thud of pneumatic hammers from nearby plants echoing across the Boilermakers' Village.

Nicole set the brass lockbox squarely in the center of the clean oak workbench.

The metal box bore a matte surface from its years entombed inside the lead vault, its corners edged with faint green verdigris. At the center of the flat lid, the gray First Century wax seal remained untouched, displaying archivist Elen's serial code stamped in low relief.

Dante took the stool across from her, his notebook open and a black ink pen poised in his right hand.

Maria pulled up the other stool, planting her elbows on the wood with her eyes fixed on the brass lid.

Nicole drew her straight-bladed dagger from her belt.

With the fine steel tip, she slit the gray wax in a clean motion so as not to crumble the seal. She tripped the spring latch.

CLICK.

The brass lid swung back slowly on bronze hinges that gave a faint squeak.

Inside lay no gems, gold coin, or exotic weapons.

There were forty long leaves of fine mineral parchment trimmed to standard bureaucratic dimensions, alongside two small copper cylinders scored with mechanical reading grooves.

The sheets were crowded with tight, angular, and perfectly legible handwriting, penned in indelible black India ink that had defied the damp of the aqueducts.

Nicole picked up the first batch of parchment with ungloved hands.

Her fingers trembled slightly as they brushed her mother's script, but she kept her composure, sorting the leaves across the workbench into three equal stacks so Dante and Maria could read alongside her.

"These are the disposal manifests," Nicole said softly, her voice steady. "From the Citadel's primary intake division."

Dante drew the first stack forward, angling the desk lamp to illuminate the lines of script.

His mind, supercharged by thirty-four Intelligence, began scanning every word with the speed of an automated card sorter.

There was information here.

A staggering amount of heavy, cold, clinical documentation.

The sheets held exhaustive logs of seventy-four live-cargo transfers routed over three years by Containment Sector Zero.

Complete tables tracked arrival dates aboard armored freights, headcounts per consignment, native taxonomy, and specific routing into the lower galleries beneath the central palace.

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Dante's eyes locked onto leaf number twelve.

There lay the entry corroborating Miro's account:

Consignment 414 - Origin: Lathe Colony of the Second Minor Continent.

Manifest: Basalt artisan family (5 individuals).

Classification: Biological reject via synthetic matrix incompatibility.

Routing: Incineration disposal in south slag ditch.

Medical note: Juvenile specimen exhibited adaptive chitin mutation. Disposal executed successfully.

Maria read the passage over his shoulder, her jaw clenching hard.

"Miro..." she murmured. "He didn't make up a single word."

"Not a single word," Nicole affirmed from her side, scanning leaf twenty. "And here are the names of the chemical reagents used to force the mutations. A compound logged as Etheric Reagent Serum Four, synthesized from Tier Four demon marrow distilled with the ash of souls holding zero sin records."

Dante kept turning the leaves, flipping the mineral parchment in swift, crisp snaps of his fingers.

He read leaf twenty-five.

He read thirty.

He read thirty-five.

His breathing grew shallow, not from physical exertion, but from a cold frustration building at the base of his skull.

He reached the fortieth leaf.

The final sheet bore only a functional chain-of-command diagram sketched by Elen's hand, outlining the command structure of the Military Citadel. At the apex of the hierarchy, above the Legion marshals and the judges of the Council of Forges, sat a solitary box inscribed with the blind eye inside the silver hexagon and an India-ink note:

Primordial Audit Division. External authority to the Nine Great Continents. Autonomous sector for soul matrix cultivation and harvesting.

Dante flipped the page.

The reverse was blank.

He checked the empty brass box, inspected the faded felt lining, examined the two copper data cylinders, and swept his gaze over the forty sheets laid across the workbench once more.

Nothing.

There was not a solitary mention of a soul dispatched to Earth.

Not a line regarding an infant born in a suburban public hospital of a human city with a full LitRPG interface stamped into his retinas from his very first cry.

No reference to the title of Light Bearer.

No entry for the name Dante Miller, no trace of dormant winged matrices grafted into frail vessels carrying four Strength, and no hint as to why one of those white-jacket operatives had personally descended into an alley seven years ago to brand the Sentinel class across Maria's chest.

In the official records of archivist Elen, Dante simply did not exist.

He was a phantom absent from intake ledgers, missing from experimental rosters, carrying no disposal voucher anywhere in the registries of this empire.

Dante dropped the final sheet onto the bench, leaning back against the wooden stool.

He stared at the dark basalt wall of the workshop, hands resting in his lap, gray eyes narrowed into a hollow gaze.

His silence caught Maria's attention.

The girl nudged the papers aside with a heavy hand, resting her forearms on the workbench to look dead into his face.

"What is it, Dante?" Maria asked, a trace of concern surfacing that she rarely let show. "What were you digging for that isn't there?"

Dante exhaled slowly, dragging his right hand over the back of his neck until his fingers brushed the edge of the basilisk bone plate shielding the [Ash Veil] across his spine.

"I thought there would be something on me," he answered, his voice low, nearly flat, stripped of the intellectual swagger he always brought to tactical debates. "I thought there would be a report on cross-dimensional soul transfers, or why I was born with this screen in my head."

He looked down at the stack of mineral parchment resting on the oak.

"Everything is in there, Maria. Miro's family, the names of the generals taking kickbacks, the formula for the venom that melted the lungs of Second Continent demons, and the designated sector where Nicole's mother vanished."

He tapped his forefinger against the oak bench.

"Yet there is nothing on who I am. Nothing about where this thing locked into my back came from."

Nicole stopped reading her mother's notes, studying the pale youth through narrowed amber eyes.

"Did you think my mother knew everything, Dante?" Nicole asked, her voice calm and free of mockery. "She was a mid-tier archivist. She only copied what crossed her desk that year. If you are something they buried outside this continent entirely, nobody would log your name on paperwork left inside an ordinary Citadel cabinet."

Maria let out a short chuckle through her nose, crossing her heavy arms over her brigandine cuirass.

She bumped his shoulder with her elbow, hard enough to sway him on the stool.

"The girl is right, bighead," Maria said, her steady, practical voice slicing right through his gloom. "Did you honestly expect to uncover your birth certificate with a stamped photo inside a box buried in a sewer main three hundred feet underground?"

Dante gave her a fleeting grimace, resetting his balance on the wood.

"It wasn't a birth certificate, Maria. It was data correlation."

"Data my ass," she fired right back. "What's on this bench is more than we ever dreamed of having while eating cold sardines in that gorge two weeks ago. We know where their pit is. We know the sigil is the blind eye. And we know that guy in the white jacket isn't an omnipotent god, he's a functionary of that Audit Division who steps down here to do the dirty work."

She slapped her palm against the flat of her new black boiler steel greatsword resting by the wall.

"We have twelve thousand clean scrip banked. I have a six-and-a-half-foot blade that cleaves automata in two without groaning. And you have thirty-four Intelligence and five hundred Mana to blow apart anything that tries shutting a door in our faces."

She looked dead into his gray eyes.

"We don't need Nicole's mother to tell us who you are, Dante. We march into Sector Zero when we hit Level 50 and ask the bastard who grafted those wings onto your spine straight to his face. And if he refuses to answer, I'll split his desk in two with this new blade."

Dante held Maria's gaze for several seconds.

The cold frustration festering in his skull receded by degrees, replaced by the mathematical clarity of the reality before them.

Maria was right.

Searching for his identity among disposal vouchers from a mid-tier regional bureau was an amateurish oversight unworthy of the methodology that had kept him alive for seventeen years.

He was an unlogged anomaly outside the ledgers. The only path to wringing the truth of his soul would be ascending to the summit of that pyramid on the raw momentum of their own progression.

Dante gathered the forty mineral parchment leaves, squared the edges with a light tap against the oak, and returned the documents to the brass lockbox, sliding the sealed container back to Nicole.

"Keep this safe," Dante told the huntress. "This is your mother's legacy. It will serve us when the time comes to breach that palace gate."

Nicole took the brass box with both hands, clutching the metal to her chest with a firm nod.

"I will," she answered. "And when the hour comes to drop down that shaft, I'll take point on the route."

Dante rose from the stool, picking up his clean notebook and pen.

"The serpent contract is cashed," Dante said, his voice settling into its familiar strategic authority. "We hold capital, we hold shelter, and we possess the coordinates to the Third Ring's hunting sectors. Tomorrow morning, we launch our heavy culling runs across the mire."

Maria broke into a wide, sharp grin under the yellow lamplight of the workshop, popping her knuckles with the certainty of someone staring down a brutal road, wielding the exact blade needed to carve through anything in their way.