12 Miles Below

Kres couldn’t give coordinates to the cave, he had no reference to do so, and we didn’t have any kind of map to share that wasn’t digital. So he’d need to guide us there himself up until ad-hoc guidance could work, and then he’d split up and fly to the greyroamers nearby. They’d come visit us at the cave where we’d make temporary shelter.

But we ran into two problems with Kres flying ahead. First is that birds fly faster than humans could run. Just not humans in Relic armor. And the second problem was more… odd.

Drakonis sat on a rock next to me, taking the moment to take a sip of water, his helmet off. I could see his eyes searching over the sky, looking for a little black dot that should be approaching. “He shouldn’t have tried to take that much back with him. Flight and weight do not go well together. And machines are made of metal.”

Kres, determined to take the scraps of Murdershrimp I’d cut into sections, had done exactly that. And it made flying both far and fast difficult.

I gave Drakonis a shrug, showing the heat plate I nicked from Murdershrimp in between two fingers. “I’m thinking of starting a collection myself. Can’t fault the bird for having the same idea.”

“Ah.” Drakonis gave me a sideyed look. “I suppose a machine corpse is exotic to your people still.”

“For the most part. Traveling underground is banned to surface clans unless you are a trader or a knight. Machines are mostly known as myth.” Though I suspect if I had been able to bring back machine parts to the surface, it’s likely Lord Atius would have sent them back down for safety reasons.

If the Undersider cities hadn’t found great use for the machine shells with such easy access to them, not much the surface could do that would be different.

“But now you work with them.” Drakonis pointed out, a hand casually waving the water flask. “You should have plenty of opportunities to satisfy your curiosity.”

He was probing about the Chosen and the clan’s alliance with machines. Fair enough. “We’re not in the business of turning on allies. I’m not that kind of savage.” And it went unworded that I expected him to do the same. “Machines, at least the ones under Wrath, have a bit of personality to them. I’m rather fond of a few.”

“Machines with personality.” Drakonis shook his head. “There a setting switch between murder-the-human and pet-the-human? A shame we hadn’t discovered that in all of human history.”

I decided to play his little game, leaning back against a rock and looking him down. “Did you know Feathers all have an innate desire to be unique?”

He expected a few different things I could say, but this took him by surprise. “No. I’m not familiar with Feathers, with only one exception. So what if they want to be unique?”

“Their identity is so tied to their core, that even their just their names are something they feel compelled to live up to. To the point it’s a weapon that can be leveraged against them.”

“A weapon?” His eyes narrowed down, as if he was looking for the catch. “How’s that even a thing?”

I had his interest here. And he knew it. So, I sent him the video file through Journey’s HUD, and he slapped on his helmet to view it. Soon enough, he was taking the helmet back off, frowning in thought.

I tapped my helmet with a finger a few times. “Who would have thought knowing how your enemy behaves could be useful information?”

Drakonis rolled his eyes, “Fine. I get it. This is your little revenge at my earlier dig.”

I gave him a thumbs up. He knew he should be asking more information, especially if it would offer him a possible advantage. And with a long suffered sigh, he turned back my way. “What else have you learned?”

“It was a pretty interesting topic to me. Machines in general don’t really care about living or dying at first. From what I learned their world starts black and white and then shades of colors begin to appear. They were obsessed over slightly different things, but all machines seemed to have one driving obsession that appeals to their models. Screamers end up circling back to anything that creates culture or brings them closer together. Probably the pack instinct if I had to guess. So arts, music, food, stories - all those things end up being what they’re obsessed over. Spiders are all about hoarding, possession, and owning territory. Maybe the idea of trade and economy might appeal to them more, as a new way to own things. Leave the human traders alive so long as they pay tribute each time they pass, bribery is universally loved. Drakes apparently love anything to do with hunting, justice and mercy. And--”

“Mercy? Drakes?” Drakonis scoffed before I could say another word. “I’ve had to deal with their lot before. The words they use are outright sociopathic. ‘Rip out the rot from the marrow of my bones, suck out the pain from the tumor deep with my skull, free me from the mortal coil.’ That doesn’t sound like mercy at all Winterscar, it sounds like a nightmare made manifest.”

Knowing Relinquished, I think that’s exactly what she hoped for with the default settings. “You know the Chosen have a drake right?”

“I know all about that fucking demon, yes.” I could see his finger tap the hilt of his sword with a nervous kind of energy. “Normally you bait a drake out, get it close enough for a group to overwhelm it the moment it’s taken a shot. That drake didn’t leave the town for anything. Half the reason we couldn’t take the town faster. I’m more surprised it didn’t start demanding sacrifices each day.”

I gave a short shrug, he was somewhat right on that front. “They’re generally so uncooperative that even Wrath gave up trying to get them to be friendly with humans.”

He saw the trap exactly for what it was, but curiosity has a nasty bite. “... how is the drake working with the Chosen if not even the fucking queen of the Feathers herself make them docile?”

“That was all Lejis’s doing. The priest.”

He started to grind his teeth, eyes looking up to the purple treeline around us. “... and how did a priest manage to convince a Drake to be friendly?”

“He talked to it, and made it realize there’s different ways to hunt, and gave it new ideas of what justice and mercy means. The Drake did the rest on its own.”

There was a beat of silence between us. He waved a hand at me, as if asking me to get it on with already. “So, this is the point where you’re going to preach to me about how machines deserve a second chance?”

I was about to answer him, but there was a ping on my HUD and further up on the trees around us came a rustling sound. And hoping from branch to branch was Kres. Wings slightly left open, beak wide with his tongue sticking out.

“The weight might be too much for you.” Drakonis said, going right for the point. “You can barely fly anymore.”

“I know.” Kres hissed back, sounding genuinely upset from the translation’s voice pattern. “But I cannot leave this treasure behind.”

“How about you bury the treasure you brought with you?” I mentioned, giving the bird a look. “You mentioned before Odin have excellent navigation abilities.”

Kres turned his beak down, then balanced on one leg, and lifted the other up to wave it down at our direction. “You speak like a greyroamer would. Digging comes easy for them. Not to the Odin.”

That seemed odd to me for only a half second before I realized the Odin did not have hands to scoop dirt up with. Or any size to make a dent in the dirt. They had claws and a beak, which weren’t great. “Starting to realize I’ve taken a lot of what we’re born with as granted.” I muttered to myself, looking down at my empty hands.

“We can bury it for you.” Drakonis said. “I can put a boulder over the site so that nothing else finds it.”

Kres took a few more hops down, and I saw the straps of his backpack were quite full of stuff. If it was all metal pieces, it must be a pretty terrible weight on the poor guy. We’d been traveling for only an hour now, and Kres had stopped being able to fly.

“I appreciate the idea.” Kres said. “But once I return, digging the treasure back up will be as difficult without bringing digging tools. And a rock too large would make it unmoveable for me. I should be searching for a tree hollow to deposit, only I am unsure if machine parts would be recovered by machines if left alone for long enough. We’ve never seen machines destroyed before.”

“They do.” Drakonis said. “Dead machine shells stay out for some time, but eventually other machines will collect the bodies. I’m not sure if hiding smaller pieces in a tree would help or not, never had to test that. It would be best to discard what you have, and collect machine parts from another source in the future.”

“I will not pass the chance.” Kres said, with a squawk of surprise before any words. “Never in the history of the Odin has any machine been felled, and never have we been able to study their secrets. I’m not certain if there will ever be another chance for this in the future.”

“We might not have that luxury. Time is expensive.” The Deathless answered. “Give us your sack and we can carry it for you. It weighs next to nothing compared to armor.”

Kres began to walk back and forth a bit, “No.” He said. “It’s mine.”

Drakonis and I shared a quick look, and I gave him a shrug in answer.

“We’ll hand it back after we’ve reached the cave.” Drakonis eventually said with a frustrated sigh. “I don’t care to hold onto small trinkets or trophies, I’ve no use for them. You have my word.”

The little Odin jumped back to a further branch away, looking down at us. “No.” He said, and nothing else.

I waved at the bird, "Why do you want to hold onto it yourself when it could be carried by us?"

"Because it is mine." The Odin said, "What is it that you do not understand?"

"It'll still be yours while we carry it, and we'll give it all back after." I insisted.

"No." He cawed, his beak pointed right at me, wings half unfolded as if he were squaring up for a fight. "It is mine. Why is this difficult for humans to understand?"

Drakonis turned to me with a look of confusion. I gave him a return shrug. “Don’t ask me. Maybe Odin have very strong feelings about possessing things? Or could just be Kres.”

The Deathless gave a long suffered sigh, then opened his mouth, but my hand shot out.

“But I can’t blame him. Half a lifetime ago before I was a knight, I’d be ripping it to pieces and bringing an overstuffed backpack even if I had to drag every scrap and piece back all at once."

He turned back to me, helmet quirked to the side. "I thought clan knights were all groomed from birth to be knights. Something about an entire caste for warriors specifically?"

"Retainers. And that caste pulls double duty as scavengers on the surface. All knights are taught how to scavenge things at the same time they're taught how to fight. Most of my life, I was a regular scavenger, so I know the mindset.” I turned to the bird next. “I got a possible solution. If you don’t want us to carry your loot, how about we carry you instead?”

“You have no harness setup.” Kres said, beak turning left and right. He was far more animated again, coming back a branch closer. “And I need to see the world from the sky to navigate.”

I wiggled a hand out. “I think we can improvise. Every half hour, we can send you back up in the air to look around for landmarks and point us in the right direction. After that we can go at a full sprint.”

Kres turned his attention between Drakonis and I, mulling it over. “... Very well, we could at least try to see how that works. Where should I perch? Same place as before?”

I brought my arm up, then patted it with my other hand. “Yep, I’ll wrap a hand around you to keep you stable, and we should be good.”

The bird began to walk back and forth on the branch for a moment, before squaring up the courage and jumping down.

Carefully, I wrapped a hand down to hold Kres’s body down, which he reluctantly allowed. I could tell he was nervous, even without words. Some things were universal.

“This good? I’m not hurting you right?” I asked.

Kres gave a squawk, “It’s strange. But it’s light enough pressure, just don’t squish me.”

I gave him a nod, which I was semi-certain Kres didn’t understand yet. Drakonis already turned and had begun a dead sprint forward.

With both of us moving at full relic armor speed now, we raced through the forest without a single thing to bar our way. HUD would reveal topology ahead of us, along with an optimal path to follow as a thin green line superimposed over, and some suggested positions for where to land our feet when vaulting or jumping up and over larger blocks.

As far at the bird was concerned, Kres probably felt the same way we’d feel at the bridge of an airspeeder, in the passenger seat.

I thought the poor fella would be terrified, we were sprinting at a much faster pace than he could fly at. It turned out the speed wasn’t what worried Kres, it was the constant feeling of near crashing, since we turned at a far slower speed than he did.

Birds have faster reflexes. By a rather significant margin. So by the time I’d spotted an obstacle and started to maneuver around it, Kres had already seen it, expected a reaction to it, noticed the lack of reaction, and began to think we were about to plow right through a tree or run into a boulder.

Every. Single. Time.

He got used to it, but I might have reduced his overall lifespan by a few years at the start.

“I see the cave from here.” Kres said, landing on my arm again. His head turned a slight degree to the right, then held that position while he lowered his body slightly. I think that’s the Odin version of pointing.

“Armor has the navigation locked in.” Drakonis said. “How far out will we travel until we reach it?”

“At your human speed, perhaps in under ten minutes. You’ll see the mountain long before the cave. Explore around, it’s not easy to miss.”

He gave one last squawk and took off to the nearby branches. I gave a slight wave, “You rested up to make it to the greyroamers from here? That pack’s still going to be heavy, you can always leave it with us.”

“No.” He said, rather possessive of his loot. “I will take more breaks, there is no rush for me. The greyroamers are fast on the ground and one has a harness I can use to ride on. I’ll guide them back to the cave.”

Which would give Drakonis and I plenty of time to actually set a camp and take some rest.

“Sounds good, safe travels.” I said, while Drakonis gave a similar farewell, turning to the HUD direction.

The cave was part of a smaller mountain, only barely larger than the trees around it, and at the center was a fat perfectly circle entrance, like a giant cilindar cut into the rock. We scaled up to it easily, getting our first real look past the purple treeline.

The tree in the distance was massive. And that’s doing the name a disservice. It looked more about the size of Capra’Nor’s pillar, and the inside was giant enough to house a full city. “That’s got to be genetically modified in some way.” I muttered, looking over at how the top branches spread like vines across the roof of the strata.

Drakonis turned his helmet up to me wordlessly, in a ‘No shit.’ type of way.

I shoo’d him off. “Let me have my fun.”

He scaled past me, getting closer to the cave entrance while I sat down and enjoyed the sight. The giant cube that was swallowed up by the tree was tilted on an axis, but the portal within was just as massive. Easily visible from all the way over here.

“You think that was built by humanity at one point?” I asked, “The portal I mean. Mites were supposed to box things up like this from the old wars. Anything too dangerous that couldn’t be disposed of.”

“Perhaps. What does it matter now?” He sent back.

“Makes me wonder why they needed a portal that big. Multiple traffic lanes? But why a circle instead of a square then. And why’s it so dangerous it had to be sealed up in a mite cube?” I could tell I’d already lost his interest, he was more after the cave than considering questions about this strata.

“The golden age had wonders.” Drakonis finally said. “Who knows?”

“Was this portal made at the very end of the golden age?” I considered. “Maybe it needed to be that big in order to fit in full evacuations. Portals lead to places after all.”

Maybe Tsuya might have more than just the surface as holdouts?

More questions circled my mind that the mite terminal inside the cave might answer, except all I heard from Drakonis when he finally scaled his way over, was cursing.

I scrambled up, weapons drawn, expecting an ambush of some kind. But the soul sight hadn’t spotted anything in the cave other than a center concept of a mite structure. Once I climbed over and into the tunnel proper, I got to see what Drakonis was upset about.

The little cave was exactly that - a tiny hemisphere cut into the rock, with a straight tunnel to the outside. And at the center of the inside was what Kres had claimed would be here.

“Goddess’s golden tits, we should have made it suffer.” Drakonis hissed his headlights pointing right down at the mite terminal ahead.

The half severed terminal.

“If this really was related to the portal, we’re fucked.” Drakonis said, helmet turning to me. “How did it even know?”

“It’s been here for centuries right?” I asked, walking up to the terminal. Top part was cleanly cut into, right down one of the monitors. “It probably mapped every location of interest nearby it’s territory, this included. And if I were Murdershrimp, after finding out I can’t beat down the two humans attacking, I’d go make sure they can’t call in more help.”

Murdershrimp hadn’t spent much time here, no claw marks anywhere else in the cave either. And the entrance was smaller than the titan, so it probably reached in deep with one of those arms in order to snag the terminal, but it didn’t need to do more damage past the first slice. I didn’t see where the other section of the mite terminal went though.

Ah, I realized immediately why the second section wasn’t here. It probably yanked it out of the cave and either carried it off, or ate it. Maybe ripped and tossed it in pieces on the way back. Just so long as I couldn’t put it back together, that’s all it needed to do.

It would have worked plenty well against any other knights down here, but I wasn’t out of the running.

“You’ve got a plan.” Drakonis said.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“Because you’re not cracking any jokes, you’re staring at that terminal like a problem to solve.”

“There might be a chance.” I said, sitting down next to the cut machine, and stretching out my soul sight. The half destroyed terminal appeared, and as I’d suspected, the actual guts and working sections of the terminal were deeper at the base, safe from the cut. “Murdershrimp didn’t break the terminal, not completely.” I said. “It destroyed the monitor and interface. All I have to do is connect a different way to it.”

“You’re trying to link the armor to it?”

“Not compatible.” I shrugged. “We barely understand relic armor software, let alone the mite ecosystem and how to connect both. But I did pick up one spell that might help.”

Inside the helmet, I was giving Journey instructions. The cut at the top of the terminal offered a perfect way for its spirit to slink through, and reach inside the ruined terminal. I’d place down a soul fractal, and then I’d jump into it and connect to the whole.

And then I hit a wall. “Material incompatible.” Journey announced.

Mite made stuff tended to be among the diet restrictions. I cursed under my breather, trying to think of a new way to work through this.

A plan B came to shape, my gauntlets yanked out a familiar little trophy. “You put me into this mess, you’re going to help me out of it.” I muttered to it, having Journey craft a soul fractal from the radiator trophy plate I’d taken out of Murdershrimp’s guts.

It got done. My hands reached into the terminal, and the metal tore off pretty easily with Journey putting the legwork. Drakonis watched as I tunneled into the broken half-pillar, bending metal around until I hit circuits.

I didn’t plan to do anything fancy. Father had been able to interface with the bunker’s systems only by having a soul fractal etched on the outside panel. Occult was about concepts, and so long as I made this fractal a part of the terminal, it would work.

The fractal of heat lit up in my hands, melting some of the metal sections inside, to which I stuck the radiator piece. The impromptu welding was pretty poor, the flames turning my fingertips a low red glow that melted the metal it touched, but it did the job. The fractal was now attached to the terminal, and nestled deeper inside without issue.

A tap on my legplate let me take out the spare power cell, and I put a small drop of power fluid right onto the fractal itself, letting the liquid flow through the grooves. I had a hunch it might work, given that fractals didn’t need any specific kind of voltage direction or integrity, just some kind of power. And I was proved right almost immediately after.

It began to glow like the occult. Before Drakonis could start sniffing around to see what I was doing, I folded up the surrounding metal to cover my handiwork. Relic armor power made it feel like I was folding paper around.

Standing back up, I gave the half-sliced terminal a pat, and then sat down next to it again to try and comune a second time.

Deep into the soul fractal, I reached a tendril out and connected with the fractal I’d welded on.

The connection held strong, and I felt the concept of it was part of the terminal. And beyond this terminal was the digital sea. And beyond that, further out somewhere, was Wrath and the others.

I dove into the fractal and got started.