The four weapon components were heavier than he anticipated. Barnes helped him rig it all up with a proper carrying harness and several nylon straps. It weighed more than Isadora did, almost at the edge of 'manageable' for Arcen. This was the second time his mutant weight had become useful in the tower.
Once the packages were secure, he stepped outside with Elena and headed towards the delivery point, about six chambers away. Waypoint 3, as it was called, was the closest supply depot to floor 457, where the current frontier was.
“We're not going to get chased by anything, are we?” Arcen asked, holding onto the straps like it was a school bag. “Asking because I can't run with this.”
“No worries! I'll make sure you won't have to,” Elena said, throwing a thumbs up as she walked.
Their walk out of the base camp chamber was uneventful, except for some small talk with other climbers along the way. Elena did most of the talking as Arcen was very nearly out of breath each time. On their way, they passed a group of men dragging three levitating bags. They had zippers like body bags, but the way they were levitating at weird angles, like tubular kites, made them look more like potato bags.
Whatever it is in there, it is not in one piece.
Arcen shuddered when he remembered Zuhara's team members who had been reduced to slices like pork chops. Whatever did that was just a hundred meters above him at this very moment. He didn't know if tower ceilings could collapse, and he was too afraid to ask it now. He didn't even want to know; he chose to believe it couldn't happen.
“Who are these military guys?” Arcen asked after they walked by with curt nods.
“They're Echo Raiders. A PMC group for towers. They're on the payroll of the guilds. They're not climbers really, mostly ex-military guys,” Elena said, turning to him as she walked. “You sounded weird when you asked about Colin from the morgue. I feel like you're planning something and not telling me.”
“Oh yeah? Look who's speaking. You haven't told me anything about your plans.”
Maybe if I bait her enough, she'll just tell me.
“Fair, fair,” she said, grinning mischievously. “I'm just saying, don't get into a fight or anything. There are no laws inside towers, but all the guilds agree they need these 'staff' guys to keep things running in frontiers. It benefits everyone. You get in big trouble if you fight them,” she said, looking at him in the eyes to make sure her words sank into his brain.
“That bad, huh?”
“Yeah. In the last tower I climbed, someone killed a security guy trying to steal a supply crate. There was a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on their head within the hour, and that idiot got decapitated, and cremated all in under twenty minutes. Someone from Skyward climbed down fifty floors just to do it. Didn't even take the bounty.”
Arcen sighed heavily. He wasn't planning on killing Wells. But it wasn't off the table. He wanted to know if Jenna got out of the tower safely or if she was dropped into a crevice and discarded like he and Torga were.
I'm not even sure if that is Wells.
He couldn't rush an altercation. This delivery was the best way to meet the man face-to-face. In the morgue, there was no hint of recognition on his scarred face. If he was actually Wells, he was really good at controlling his reaction to seeing someone he shot dead just days ago walking around.
He could’ve written Arcen off as a different Ceph, but judging from the reactions he got from other climbers in base camp, Cephs were’t a common sight in towers. The likelihood of there being two full Cephs in a place where the population density was less than a few hundred was vanishingly low. That left only two options. Either it was Wells, and he was really good at pretending, or it wasn’t Wells at all, just someone who unfortunately looks just like him. To find out what happened to Jenna, he had to figure out which option was true.
The chamber adjacent to the basecamp was a swamp with wooden bridges connecting the islands poking out of the water. In the shallow muddy waters below, there were large shapes that swam at incredible speeds, leaving trails of splashes behind. It looked like some sort of Ray fish, but with three tails and a weird, missile-like head.
There were hunters on the islands below with spears connected to anchors planted deeply into the mud. One of the ray fish slammed into a hunter as he watched, sending the man twenty feet into the water, where several other trails converged on him from all directions. He flailed around, tossed something into the water, and curled into a ball.
A loud explosion followed, sending mud and splashing water everywhere. Some droplets hit Arcen on the face, about two hundred meters away.
Just tossed a fucking grenade on a fishing trip.
Arcen couldn’t imagine these mud-dwelling missiles would taste good enough to warrant all this trouble.
A low guttural screech came from the ceiling, as if something was disturbed by the sudden noise. He looked up and almost missed a step over a plank.
“Holy shit!” He shouted, eyes wide and mouth open. On the ceiling was a ray fish the size of an airplane. It had been pinned to the ceiling with a bunch of crystal pillars that looked like nails, but it was still alive.
It had a maw of a mouth the size of a car with six sharp teeth.
“Ah, yeah. One of Rika’s guys did that. Holmer, I think.”
“Why not just kill it?” Arcen asked, hurrying his steps. He was directly below the creature, and he had growing anxiety about those crystal nails. He couldn’t tell how these hunters just casually set up a fishing operation with a hundred-ton animal hanging from the ceiling above them.
“Keeping it alive for research, I think. It was bought by some guild. They’re catching the babies right now, as you can see.“
What sort of research is that?
“Tons of weird shit inside these towers, I didn't think you could just buy a creature like that,” Arcen said, still looking up.
”GGC pays for it sometimes. They have a whole agenda set for the next thirty years. Have you seen it?“ she asked, turning around. She seemed more excited by politics than by the fact that there was a giant fish on the ceiling.
“I hadn’t given a fuck about GGC for a long time,” Arcen said with a sigh.
“Panlangrian Core Speech Project, they call it. It's been running since even before Mayday, from some rumors I've heard.”
“Great. They knew about Mayday before it happened as well?”
“Has to be. They rule the world now, don't they?”
“What is this, Panlangra? You never explained it to me?” Arcen asked, grabbing the railing as he stepped down a crooked staircase made of planks.
“Ah! I forgot!” Elena slapped her oily forehead. “Panlangra is the language inside towers. Panlangra is the scientific word for Rootsong. It's what you see in your eyes, the sounds in your ears when the tower communicates with you. It's a language that you can't really speak with your mouth or write with your hand. There is no alphabet. It's also different from person to person. Most of them see veins of some sort. They say it's showing letters in their own language, but it really isn't, because if you make them draw what they see on paper, it's always nonsense scribbles.”
That explains the gold veins and the hum.
“So Panlangra is like Mind Matrix, but for towers. Got it.”
“Wrong!” Elena yelled. “Alright. You have it backwards. Panlangra came first. Mind Matrix is just a product built on top of it.”
“Like a Silicon Valley startup from back in the day? How is that even possible?”
“No!” Elena yelled again. “It's a contract. No one knows where the GGC got it. Let's just say someone climbed a tower in the early days, they got a contract that works kinda like Panlangra. I'm making it too simple,“ She said, closing her eyes. ”It could be a bunch of contracts. We don't know. Whatever it is, it's the GGC's way of controlling the world. The condition for Mind Matrix is that it overrides Panlangra outside of towers.”
“I'm not nearly drunk enough to understand how that works,” Arcen said with a sigh. He could wrap his mind around Panlangra being a language, quite possibly a programming language. Mind Matrix was software built with it. He wasn't fully on board with the absurdity of Mayday, even eight years later with tentacles on his head. “So Panlangra exists outside of towers, but it's overlaid with Mind Matrix? like a different UI for the same system?” He asked, trying to understand the life he'd been living for eight years.
“Yes. And GGC allows other parties, like companies or public services, to access Mind Matrix to develop their own variants on top of it. This is how you had a Helviter dashboard. Or even the menus that pop up when you're buying snacks from a vending machine, or the notifications you see in public transport. It's all built on top of Mind Matrix.”
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“How did they even do this shit?” Arcen asked. He'd been too asleep to notice any of these things until now. He got used to the Mind Matrix as he got used to the touch screen smartphone. He never really wondered about how it works beyond the first week's novelty effect.
“Well, they distributed it through a vaccination that was supposed to stop mutations. All that was in that vaccine was a fraction of a milliliter of blood.”
“Blood?” Arcen asked, completely lost. He couldn't even remember the vaccine. He got injected with a hundred different things in the quarantine camp before GGC even existed. Kysa and Kylan got the vaccine through a mandatory visit to the hospital while he was rotting in the camp. Thinking about it, he'd missed out on this whole thing.
Elena sighed. “I think it's how everyone sees the same thing. Mind Matrix isn't like Panlangra, where it has a unique language for each person. Every Helviter employee sees the same dashboard, for example. It works because you and everyone else in the world got injected with a tiny bit of blood from the first human that contracted Mind Matrix.”
“They drained that poor fuck for all his blood like a cow?”
Elena laughed. “That I don't know. I don't even know if this is exactly how it works. But that vaccine definitely had some blood cells in it. I saw a report from a lab long ago. I know that blood definitely has something to do with a contract.”
This is crazy. A layered clusterfuck of systems that keeps society running smoothly.
The post-Mayday world made a lot of sense now that he reimagined it as a cosmic horror dot com bubble. Someone had always been at the top, someone knew enough, or had enough foresight to build a world-conquering tech product just a few years into the post-apocalypse.
The cards had never been in anybody's hand. They had not even been playing the same game. He was beyond whining about this being unfair and unjust; his life had always been that way. He didn't need to rage against this new world government. At this point, he was just plain impressed by how far these people went to conquer the whole of Earth, and how well it worked out for them.
None of these scary tower creatures could plot for years just to fuck everyone in the ass like that.
He made himself giggle silently with that thought. He was living in a timeline where cartoon villains won. Either that, or the villains had always been cartoonishly evil at a fundamental level, just with a photorealistic filter.
They walked through the chamber with no issues. Someone had to have built these bridges. Rika's presence in the base camp had added benefits. This floor had been basically turned into a frontline village over the course of a few months.
The next three chambers were just as uneventful, although they had wilder creatures. All the troublesome ones had already been killed, leaving behind the docile ones that lumbered around. They didn't even encounter any of them directly, as the creatures stayed far away from the cleared foot path. They passed groups of climbers on their way, some resting on the side of the road or hauling supplies just like them.
The fifth chamber was something different. It was a forest clearing with cliffs all around and trees that looked thousands of years old even at a glance. Arcen had never seen trees like that anywhere. Their branches swirled and twisted around each other in a complete mess of organized chaos. In the middle of the chamber was the oldest tree of all, a behemoth with a twisted trunk. It looked like a bonsai plant scaled up to real-life proportions.
Gathered around it were people and something that he thought was people.
The creatures in this chamber stood on two legs and walked around exactly like people. They were pearly white with petal-like skin wrapped around their bodies. Arcen gasped when one of them turned towards them as they approached.
“Don't freak out. That's a tribe,” Elena said, grabbing his hand.
He'd heard about these tribes. He couldn't resist the urge to know what they are.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
REVEAL
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
The creature didn't move at all. There was nothing in its movements to suggest it detected Arcen's use of a skill against it.
╭ ╰︶?? ERITHERIA ?? ︶╯ ╮
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ ACTIVATION SUCCESS ╰︶
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SPECIES ╰︶
????
YERDECIN
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SENTIENCE ╰︶
????
91%
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ TRAITS ╰︶
????
SENSE
??
CAMOUFLAGE
??
EXTRACT
??
REGENERATE
??
SUFFERENCE
??
FAITH
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ DOMAIN ╰︶
????
BRILLIANT WHITE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ AURA ╰︶
????
129,398
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
That's much lower Aura than I thought?
He remembered Gareth telling him this amount of Aura wasn't enough to survive even in twentieth floor. This creature had something different that made it possible.
Elena bowed at the Yerdecin and made Arcen do the same. He almost toppled face-first into the creature with his top-heavy package. The creature acknowledged them and stepped out of the way, letting them continue. This happened three more times on their walk towards the huge bonsai plant.
”They seem oddly peaceful for things living four hundred and fifty floors up,“ Arcen remarked, once the path cleared and he didn't have to keep bowing anymore.
”They're peaceful and sentient. So they're protected. I think Skyward signed them in.“
”Why?“
”If you can talk or communicate with a tribe, they are treated differently in towers. Especially if they're peaceful. Some even get moved out of towers if the tower is falling. GGC has a different category for them with rights and everything.“
This was something he had never heard about. He had personally never seen a tower creature outside of a tower. He'd seen them in news stories where something climbed down and wreaked havoc before getting hammered by the military, or as exotic pets in busted trafficking operations.
It made sense to preserve the intelligent lifeforms like this one. He just didn't know where they would be shipped off to when the tower eventually collapsed.
Maybe they have their own country of alien creatures somewhere.
The tree had stone pillars sunk into it on nearly every root. There were at least a hundred of them. Yerdecin walked between them, occasionally cleaning them gracefully with their fingers.
”Check that tree,“ Elena said, nudging her head towards it. Arcen used Reveal right away.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
REVEAL
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
He paused and came to a halt as the results came in.
╭ ╰︶?? ERITHERIA ?? ︶╯ ╮
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ ACTIVATION SUCCESS ╰︶
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ NAME ╰︶
????
IDOREAN
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SPECIES ╰︶
????
UNKNOWN
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SENTIENCE ╰︶
????
INHERENTLY OBSCURED
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ TRAITS ╰︶
????
INHERENTLY OBSCURED
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ DOMAIN ╰︶
????
BRILLIANT WHITE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ AURA ╰︶
????
111,231,398
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
Inherently obscured? Never seen that before!
”Holy smokes. Hundred million.“
”Yeah. That's why they don't have a lot of Aura. They deposit everything they have into the tree,“ Elena said. ”That tree also has a name, and the species is unknown. Weird, huh?“
”What does that mean, though?“
”A bunch of crazy things, I don't really know which one to tell you,“ She said dismissively.
There were people sitting around under the tree, giving them curious looks as they approached. Yerdecin walked among them without disturbing them. They had their hands together like they were praying.
”Is this a religious thing?“
”Yeah. Red Catholics claimed this one. I think they're the ones paying Skyward to keep this chamber safe.“ She waved her hand towards the tree. ”Do you wanna sit down and pray?“ She asked curiously.
”Not that religious.“
Arcen hadn't grown up religious, nor had he subscribed to any of these new religions post-Mayday. They were fusions of old ones, mixing and matching parts that still worked in a world with eight gods.
Mayday fits like a glove for all Abrahamic religions because people turned into trees, and there were twelve days of blood rain. In the early days, there was a surge of apocalyptic preachers who predicted the end times, rupture, hell, and chaos. The GGC restructured them or wiped them out as soon as they came into power. Red Church is one of the major ones that was allowed to exist. It was the closest one to old-world Catholicism.
”I don't pray either. But I do this thing,“ She said, taking a sudden turn to the left along a grassy foot path. There was a confusing mess of wooden carvings piled into a box-shaped shrine made of flat stones. There were threads all around it with thin stripes of paper swaying in the breeze. ”You're supposed to write the names of people you love to bless them, alive or dead.“
Arcen didn't want to do it. He didn't believe in a weird tower tree doing anything for anyone. He also didn't want to upset Elena by saying it out loud. He had a similar thing with Kysa, who believed his mother was still alive inside the tree she turned into.
He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the names that he cared about.
Kylan Henwick.
Kysa Henwick.
Angelica Henwick.
Who else?
He paused, trying to remember names. He didn't have a lot that he wanted to bless. The next name wasn't that far into his memories.
Gareth.
He kept writing other names as well.
Jenna.
Torga.
I don't even know their last names.
That didn't matter at all. This wasn't really about blessing them. This was all about remembering them. He hung the piece of paper with a loose thread. Elena hung her piece of paper right next to his. It was a smaller piece of paper than his, already oil-drenched and blotted. There was only one word on it.
Helene.
He noted that for later as Elena read the list of names on his. “How many of yours are dead?” She asked with a curious smile.
“Two dead for sure, one turned into a tree, one missing,” Arcen answered dryly. “Yours?” He asked, not expecting a solid answer.
“Alive right now but dead soon," Elena said in a low voice and turned away.
Now that's very interesting.
Elena is an onion with many layers.
Next chapter on Monday.
Regular reminder to rate/review if you’re enjoying the ride!
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