Albert perked up. “Oh, oh oh oh! This Alignment Bio-Lab do be hiding all sorts of goodies!”
He didn’t realize that he was speaking quite loudly until Scrappy got up and joined him. Albert felt bad like that time he had woken up his cat, and seeing the girl stretch and yawn only strengthened the image in his mind.
“Sorry, did I wake you?” He asked apologetically, although he had to suppress a chuckle at how similar she looked to a cat stretching.
“Mm s’fiiiiine. What did you find?” She rubbed her eyes.
“Remember when I talked about the planet Erebus?” He grinned. “Well, I now know where this lab got all the Alignment Energy from. And if I’m right… well, we’ll see when we get there. Go get some sleep, there is still a long way before we reach the core.”
I wonder why they brought it here.
I might have an answer to that question. Jeff supplied. A data packet soon unfolded in Albert’s brain.
His eyes widened.
Oh. It’s not just a random core at all, is it? This is good, great even! So, they broke it in pieces and brought one of them here to study it, huh? Wanted to see if they could goad a portal into spewing out Alignment Energy without tickling the Lithoids.
Jeff nodded assent in a way only a disembodied AI could. And unleashed literal arthropod hell in the process.
Mutants in a bio-lab underground. Very cliché, don’t you think? He scratched his stubble, which had grown back yet again. What’s this mention of the Scarlet Sorceress over here?
There seemed to be sightings back when this database was last saved.
Back when the world was still whole. Not only is this Sorceress real, then, but she predates the collapse. Who is she?
Looks like a criminal. A very powerful one, according to the last entry.
The internet… failed, after that? Wow. She must have brought it and all of communications down to stop my mother from coordinating the war efforts from Sitea. According to the logs…
It was not going well.
We all know how it went in the end. They lost. And now the world is losing yet again, but this time it isn’t even fighting back. We have to hurry and eliminate this wretched timeline from ever coming into being.
***
“Alright, time for the home run.” Albert announced after a particularly light breakfast. “The core is in this room,” he pointed at the map, “and there is a good half a kilometre of corridor and rooms between there and here.”
“Only a few monsters, though,” Lina said, using her hands to manipulate the map.
“Yeah, but the readings aren’t all that accurate due to interference. They could be powerful, powerful enough to explain why they are so few.”
“Or,” she held up a finger. “We might just be lucky! No?”
Scrappy shook her head while smiling.
Albert chuckled. “See? She’s catching up quickly. There’s no such thing as luck when I’m concerned, lady.”
Lina groaned. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
The door echoed her groan as they pushed it open, spilling back out into the dimly lit corridor. Compared to the first layers of the underground compound, this close to the portal and to the core the lights were brighter and in better working conditions in the corridors, but at the same times the monsters were stronger and tougher in the rooms.
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“Makes you wonder why the corridors are pristine while the rooms are filled to the brim with nightmare creatures.” Lina muttered.
Albert hummed. “It does…”
But there was no use making theories. There surely was a plausible explanation, and Albert was pretty sure it had to do with how the ventilation system was basically a network of interconnected pipes that mostly ended up in the main rooms, but he didn’t have the time to check. Not that it mattered. Theirs was an extraction mission: get in, find the items, and get out. Possibly through the portal.
The first two rooms out of the five they had to traverse were still the swarm type, albeit with less monsters that were tougher and harder to kill. They put a strain on the team, but it simply meant that Albert had to begin taking the fights seriously.
The third room changed things, however.
“What the hell?”
The door opened to an indoor jungle. Leaves, ferns and dangling vines overlooked not the concrete floor of the facility, but an underground lake of muddy, lukewarm water. Sparks shone dim light that bathed the room orange from the far end of the lake, where an entire section of the wall was singed and black in a spiderweb pattern. The rest of the space was in almost utter darkness. What few plants there were sported huge leaves to be able to survive on sparklight only.
The shadows were long and ominous.
A snaking dark thing, like a shadow fixture on the wall entered the lake from the ceiling. Albert’s eyes followed it.
Beside him, Lina was about to enter the room proper. Albert noticed when her foot was mere inches from the water. The water… the snake coming from the ceiling… the sparks. It was not just water. Lina was inches from dipping her foot into electrified water.
He threw himself to the side in a jerking motion, clumsily blocking the way and pressing the woman against the doorframe. For a long moment, she hung there with a leg extended forward, her momentum arrested by the presence of his body pinning her. Then he yanked her back with a grunt eliciting a yelp of pain and surprise.
“What was that?” She protested.
“The water.” He said. “Look at the far end.”
She gasped. “Lightning.”
Meanwhile, Scrappy was transfixed. She was watching the water with an intensity that was almost disturbing, but since neither Albert nor Lina had seen anything through the darkness and the mud, they hadn’t paid her any mind. Until…
“Guys?” She said in a small voice, dropping into a feline stance. “I see something moving, that I do.”
Albert glanced at his minimap. “A single vital sign. But it’s not moving!”
Then he looked back down. Just in time to see it.
Something shot out of the water. Lina was fast, but not fast enough. A tentacle of green, slick, putrid matter homed in on Scrappy’s face. The girl yelled, threw herself backwards, but the tentacle was too fast.
“Shit! Scrappy!”
Albert cursed and threw himself back. Lina hacked at the tentacle but it retracted before she could do any damage. By the time Albert got close enough, all he could see was muddy water splashing on the corridor, lit by fluorescent light. Scrappy was nowhere to be seen.
Anger began to gather in Albert’s consciousness. He mustered up his Power—
A portal opened behind him, spewing out a frazzled looking catgirl wrought in shadow.
Albert gasped in relief. “Oh thank god you’re safe.” Without wasting a moment, he directed his attention towards the door, where other tentacles were already lashing out at them. “Lina, get away from the door! Space, space!”
A movement of his hands, the usage of some energy he gathered from the slain monsters of the last few rooms and barrier went up, severing the tentacles. The plants slithered back into the brackish water.
Once he was sure the team was safe, Albert finally slumped against one of the walls. It took a few moments for his beating heart to calm down and for his breath to return to somewhat normal. Time he spent without taking his eyes away from the blown door hinges leading to the underground swamp. Continuously feeding energy to the barrier from a shrinking core. When it winked out he swapped it for the core made from the second room’s monsters.
“The plants.” He said, wiping some mud from his face before it entered his mouth. The stuff smelled foul. “It’s one single organism. That’s why we saw only one dot.”
“…is there a way around this room?” Lina asked.
Albert shook his head. “We need to go through.”
“How? The monster hides in water we cannot touch! It sees us and can attack us while we can’t see it.”
“Yeah, not easy.” He conceded. “Scrappy? How did it look from the shadow world? Can you attack it?”
The girl, despite the earlier scare, didn’t hesitate. “I don’t think so. The moment I emerge to strike… I could try, though.”
“No.” Albert said. “No stupid risks. Push comes to shove, we can always brute force this. First rule of warfare: if brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it.” A smile bloomed on his face. “Speaking of…”
A portal opened, leading to his inventory.
“Albert, you’re not thinking of—”
“Oh yeah.”
Color drained from Lina’s face. “A nuclear weapon? Here??”
“Oh, no.” Albert said, realizing why she was reacting like that. Of course she didn’t know. “I have all sorts of explosives in here beside nuclear bombs. I’ll show you another first rule of warfare: there is no such thing as cheating.”