Chapter 424 [418] 5.42 Oceandepths Manor III

The moment Chloe has me patched up well enough to walk and think about how close I managed to come to Death’s door without actually triggering the first effect of [The Undying], I start looking through the quickly disintegrating corpse in the hopes of finding some sort of loot.  There better damn well be some loot, and some better than average loot, considering that the little stunt melted my weapon into a puddle of amorphous silver that has a modest amount of intrinsic value to collectors and won’t do a damn to protect us from whatever else might be lurking in this forgotten city.

Filia’s true form, the [Philosopher’s Ore] that has again taken the shape of a perfect cube, is untouched.  Not so much as a scratch on it from the electrical energy.  The stone itself says no word, but conveys a wordless sense of acknowledgement of its own sacrifice, as well as an acknowledgement of my intention to reforge it from one of the more magical metals that now populate this universe.  And I already have a couple of ideas on that front.

Amongst the disintegrating corpse are a couple of items that still glint with power.  Three violet scales, each as big as my face, a shard of one of its teeth, and a yellow sac about the size of a basketball.  The latter of those shocks me as I reach out to touch it.  Rubber gloves prove sufficient insulation for me to take that into my [Inventory] as well.  Perhaps one day it can be used to provide a substantial [Lightning] augmentation to a weapon or piece of armor.

“How are you holding up?” Lindsey asks.  She’s holding an eyeball the size of her torso, which, ew.  But also, a potent substrate for future potion creation.

“I’ve definitely had better days.  When I almost died.”

“You’re going to have to be a little more specific on that.”

I roll my eyes.  “Please don’t say that in front of Chloe.”

Chloe stares daggers at both of us.  Which, fair enough, I suppose.  I lower my head.

Lindsey makes the giant eyeball vanish with a flash of neon-yellow light.  “Will you be able to fight without your weapon?”

I pause.  “I will be more inefficient without a more proper weapon.  I don’t know if [Sentinel’s Standard] will work correctly without some sort of polearm to channel it.  I do have one idea I want to try, that might help temporarily.”

I summon forth the [Simple Ray Blaster], eyeing the construction with a more curious eye now that we are no longer in immediate danger.  [Cyber-Sentinel’s Form] allows me to assimilate technological constructions into my body.  The Skill provides no particular instruction on how to actually go about doing so.  The only time I’ve done so since formally getting the Skill is when I absorbed the [Crimson Heart], and that was a harrowing ordeal I’d rather not re-experience anytime soon.  Or at all.

I hold the blaster next to my arm and concentrate on the Skill.  Nothing happens, though for the briefest moment, I do sense a hint of resonance between my arm and the gun.  With eyes closed, I move the blaster up and down my arm, then from side to side, trying to find out if there’s some position that amplifies the resonance.  None seem to work.

Moving the device closer to my arm has the opposite effect.  Attempting to force the merger causes the weapon to all-but-fly out of my hand in disgust.  Is this damn weapon rejecting me?

No, I quickly realize.  I’m rejecting it.  This weapon has been judged too weak to properly integrate into my system, and so my body is rejecting it with the same dismissal as it would seek to eradicate a virus— computer or biological– that might try to ravage me from within.  The thought makes me wonder if I really do have to worry about my body getting hacked.  [The Unbound] should protect me from anything the people of Earth can cook up right now, but what’s to say that there’s not some high-level [Computologist] or whatever the class might be called that is actually capable of exactly that.  I shudder at the thought.

“No good?” Lindsey asks.

“No good,” I say.  “My body considers itself too good for this piece of junk.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Chloe says.  “Do you need a gold star for figuring that out all on your own?”  She huffs, but the words are all laced with amusement.  “And yes, before you ask, I completely and totally agree.”

“Well, whenever you two lovebirds have finished flirting with each other, I think it would be wise to seek cover.  Just because nothing else has crawled out of the dirt yet to eat us doesn’t mean that something won’t be heading this way.”

I gaze toward the center of the city.  That’s where we need to go; it’s as obvious as can be.  But we're not in an extreme rush, and we’re not in any condition to head out just yet.

“Are we being tracked or watched, to the best of your knowledge?” I ask Lindsey.

“I doubt it.  If your eyes don’t see anything, I can’t imagine it exists.  Besides, I thought you and your soon-to-be father-in-law were the ones on the cutting edge of that sort of research and development.”

“We are, at least publicly.  I was asking if you had military intelligence relating to any other groups that were working on similar technologies.  If I knew what to look for, I would be able to make a determination with greater confidence.”

“I’m sorry.  Just because I’m in special ops and occasionally do espionage work doesn’t mean I have the same knowledge of SIGINT and related counterintelligence.”

“No worries.”  I pull out a can of fizzy water.  “Do you want one, Lindsey?  I’ve got a few dozen different flavors in there.”

“I didn’t think you enjoyed soda water, Seraphina.”

“I didn’t in the past.  I guess I sort of… developed an acquired taste after too many faculty meetings where it was regularly served.”

Chloe pulls out a bottle of water along with a flavoring pouch.  “Sera swears by it, but I still haven’t come remotely near acquiring any sort of taste for that piss water.”

“Piss water?  I didn’t realize you’d developed a habit for such colorful language as well.”

“You have no idea how much shit talking the nurses get into when they think you can’t hear them.  They talk shit about the bosses, the administration, the patients.  I thought I left high school behind three years ago, but some of my coworkers sure haven’t!”

“Then they would fit right at home with the new recruits.”

Chloe takes out a half-eaten sub sandwich she stored away a couple of weeks ago.  “Any other fun stories that the government will allow you to tell us?”

“Nope.”  Lindsey grins.  “But I’ve got a couple that I’m going to tell you anyway.  Let me tell you about Incident 13-M.  I had gone down with some new recruits to supervise them as they cleared out a dungeon rated for levels around 35 or so.  Well, a couple of the… less disciplined members of my team decided that after the boss fight, they were going to search another hallway for treasure or hidden passages or…

“The short version of the story is that they had actually snuck off to engage in… extracurricular activities of a more… lascivious nature than is permitted by Army policy.  And yes, I did catch the two of them with their pants down, in the act.”

“Oh good gods…”  Chloe’s face turns ashen.  “I can only imagine how much of an aneurysm Alana had when she received that particular incident report.”

“Oh, that was the best part, at least for those of us not receiving the dressing down.  Did you know that the word ‘fuck’ can be seamlessly inflected into every part of speech in the English language?”

“I was aware, yes,” Chloe says.  “How bad of a court-martial did they get for that?”

“Well, fortunately for them, it was the Major’s pleasure that the incident not result in a general court-martial, mostly because it could’ve reflected poorly on her as a young and female senior officer.  They did, however, enjoy thirty days in solitary and six months of latrine duty, then an extra shift each week of overnight patrol before they could get their E-3 reinstated.”

“And did they shape up after the extracurricular discipline?” I ask.

“Nothing ‘extra’ about that curriculum.  And surprisingly enough, yes.  I won’t speak more on their current whereabouts to protect the guilty from further humiliation.  Just, if you do hear someone refer to Private Little Johnson, it might not actually be because their last name actually was Johnson.”

“Oh gosh,” Sera said.  “I don’t even want to think about how awful it would be to have that hanging over my head for between four and twenty years.”

“And he should have thought about that before deciding that he couldn’t keep it in his pants in the middle of a goddamned dungeon.  At least then it could have been handled more discreetly.”

I am forced to concede the point.

“So tell us,” Lindsey says.  “Do you have any embarrassing stories to share with the rest of us?”

“Oh gosh.”  I pause for a moment.  I take a drink of my club soda that goes on for long enough that Lindsey starts to give me the side-eye.  Yes, I am being deliberate about my attempts to stall while I think of an answer.  No, you don’t have to make things more awkward than they already are.

“Okay,” I say, having finally recalled an incident.  “Not so much a ‘funny’ or necessarily ‘embarrassing’ story as one that has really stuck with me.”

Chloe looks at me, already having figured out what incident I plan to talk about.

“Now, back when Chloe and I started teaching Combat Training, the average level of the world was still pretty low.  It wasn’t unheard of in the first couple of semesters to see people coming in having never so much as equipped a weapon and with levels in the single digits.  The low single digits, in some situations.  And, well, their inexperience was matched by their clumsiness.

“These days, of course, most people will reach at least level 20 or 25 by the time they hit college.”  Usually a noncombat class, like a [Student] or a variant thereof.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s quite rare for kids to get many combat classes as thief base classes.  The only reason why Chloe and I only got combat classes was because of our own past origins.  We simply had too much experience fighting to be offered anything else.

“This girl, however, was Level 5.”  I pause for emphasis.

“How did this individual manage to remain so low leveled?” Lindsey asks.

“Oh, it’s absolutely brilliant.  She told me that she ‘couldn’t commit to a choice of class’ and had heard, in her words, ‘horror stories’ about people who ‘couldn’t control the impulses associated with their new classes’.  Which, if you’ve never gone through it, I can understand how that would be something to worry about.  But I…  Well, I was going to say that it’s not like choosing a [Fire Mage] Class forces one to abandon all reason and take up a career path as an arsonist.  Then I remembered Kristil.”

“I’m sure she’s going to be having the absolute time of her life these next few weeks or months or however long this shit goes down,” Chloe says.

“So anyway, and I don’t think anyone knew this at the time, but this girl made it all the way to Level 5 before the System locked her out and demanded she choose a Class before she could continue to gain levels and Experience.  And she just didn’t.  For over two years.  She sat at Level 5 and accumulated stored Experience and just… didn’t care if she was falling behind in school or not gaining Skill Ranks or stat points or anything else.  I feel bad for her that she was so terrified, and I can’t even blame her, exactly.”

“I’m impressed that she’d be so willing to stick to her guns like that,” Lindsey says.  “I doubt she’d have a place in the Army, but that level of discipline is commendable.”

“She ended up going down the path of a [Martial Artist] in the end, figuring it would help her stay disciplined and focused.  The nice thing is that the System gave her a pretty nice Class Skill at the end of it all, though she didn’t specify all the details.”

“I’m curious what else we still don’t know,” Lindsey says.  “And more importantly, how to hedge against those risks.”  She stands, eyes toward our destination.  “But I think we should get going as soon as both of you are healed up and ready.”