164 – Power gap

“Stay here,” Albert said, after deploying a shield to make sure his allies couldn’t be detected. “I need to see how strong those things are.”

“You are not going to fight them alone, are you?” Elle said a little bit more forcefully than Albert expected.

“Yeah,” Lina echoed her, “don’t take unnecessary risks. I didn’t abandon my old life just for you to die on me here.”

Seeing that even Scrappy was nodding along, Albert’s eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened into a thin line.

“I don’t see much confidence in my abilities.” He said, and left before any of the girls could reply to his statement. He didn’t think he would have liked the answers, although he was pretty sure he would have mostly received sarcastic ones.

The mechanical monsters loomed. Despite what he had told the girls after seeing them even though it was from afar, Albert got a feeling that perhaps the warning he received weren’t so unnecessary when it came around to this particular fight. It was going to be dangerous, especially because Albert could feel the Lair drawing and expending huge amounts of mana from half a city away.

He approached on open terrain, disguising his features before he could be detected. His magical signature was completely different than how it was the last time the Lair had seen him, so he didn’t worry about that.

On cue, as soon as he emerged on the main road, the three mechanical behemoths turned to face him. Even as their forms were immobile, the metal betrayed a sense of tension and power waiting to be released. Hisses of steam and grinding mechanical parts could be heard from even the great distance Albert was at, and while he couldn’t see most of the things’ bodies because they were hidden by the buildings, he was sure that there were dozens of weapons trained on him.

He approached slowly. For a while, neither he nor the robotic giants did anything. He walked, and they waited, slowly swivelling their heads to track his position.

As he got closer, Albert realized that the machines were in worse shape than they had looked from a distance. They were mismatched piles of rusting metal, bent pipes and leaking conduits, sometimes jerking with random motions that were clearly not intended to happen. They had been repaired many times, and most of those times it was evident that it had been a shoddy job at best. Whether it was due to Lair’s matter fabricators having broken down in the millennia that passed, or due to its degradation, it was hard to say.

Still, their sheer size and the magical pressure they exerted onto the world was enough to give even him pause. He wondered, for a moment, how formidable they must have looked like before millennia of damage and bad management by a degraded Lair had left them in this state.

“Who are you? A new guest?” A robotic, faintly human voice erupted from the three giants in unison. It slammed onto Albert like a physical thing, to the point he had to use his Power not to suffer internal damage.

No openings for hacking.

Thanks, Jeff. Scan it.

“I might be. Is the inn cheap? I don’t have much coin.” Albert yelled back.

“Oh! Someone with a sense of humour!” The Lair said, amused. “Finally. I was growing tired of those old mages. Bags of bones, the lot.”

Albert’s eyes narrowed. “Is that because you literally kept their skeletons?”

The amusement in Lair’s voice grew. “My, my, you are a funny one. Too bad you and your friends are going to join the mages soon. No trespassers in Sitea until my master is back from her trip.”

Albert paused. “Who? Samantha Cromwell?”

He had almost said ‘my mother’.

“I don’t know!” Lair said. Albert could almost make out a shrug by the voice only. The robots did not move. “I don’t remember the name. But she is not back, that’s for sure. I would know if she was.” If there was any recognition of the name in Lair’s voice, it was not evident from how it spoke.

“How can you be sure?” Albert asked back. He was stalling for time. Jeff, is the scan coming along?

A few more seconds, Albert.

Albert continued. “It could be that you forgot how she looked like, and now she’s just another skeleton in your mage skeletons collection.”

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It was all pure speculation, but the mere thought sent a chill down Albert’s spine. He suppressed it. It didn’t matter, he would be back in the past soon. There was just this little threat to deal with first. Except, it didn’t seem like it was a very little threat at all.

Scan complete.

Albert’s eyes widened. Jeff had done much more than just scan the robots, the AI had matched their energy signature with anything even remotely similar in the whole city.

The Lair seemed to notice his shift in attitude. “You look like you finally understand!”

That was all the warning Albert got before the three robots attacked. He didn’t wait around, instead summoning every ounce of his Power to get the hell out of there and quick. Not a moment too soon, because the spot he was standing on erupted in a column of nuclear fire, the ground and the air in a volume of several cubic meters reduced to subatomic components.

Almost quick enough to catch the tail end of Albert’s teleport. Surely quick enough to make him feel like his ass was on fire.

“We are in deep shit,” Albert said after things quieted down.

For a while they had hidden inside his soulspace until he began to feel the strain of sustaining so many people there, after which they had returned to the material world but had hidden inside a dome of invisibility. Actively suppressing their heat, scents and sounds seemed to be enough to deter whatever was left of the Lair AI from actively seeking them.

“At least we know it’s only reacting to threats.” Lina said, her mind immediately shifting gears and analysing the situation.

“Or to what it perceives as threats, at least.” Albert said.

“Does it?” Elle asked, “it seemed to me like it wanted to be hospitable at first, although its methods were probably not the most orthodox.”

“I think it was sarcastic.” Scrappy said.

“Oh? It was toying with us?” Elle said, surprised. Albert smiled at her.

“Yeah, some subroutine definitely got mixed up with the threat detection system. With the rest of the personality matrix degrading around it, the self-defense module could trigger at any time.”

A short silence followed. “We are in deep shit, Sir Albert, aren’t we?”

“Language!” Albert joked, enjoying the cute outrage at being called out on Scrappy’s face. “Well, I had Jeff try to infiltrate the computer systems and it didn’t work. Which already is a bad thing. But my AI also confirmed something that had been eating at the back of my mind for a while.”

“Which is?”

“When we made the Lair, we thought it was constrained by whatever magic the System was made of, right?”

“…right.”

“Which, by the way, is still a huge unknown to me. I plan to investigate when we go back to the past.” He waved his hands. “Anyway, due to this and to the nature of a GPT network making it nigh-impossible to impose constraints on its own programming, the Lair was left with a greater degree of freedom than it was probably wise.”

“Meaning,” he continued. “that not only did it have access to the material fabricators, but it also had access to direct manipulation of magic. And it’s had both these things for millennia longer than us.” He looked at Elle. “Most of us, at least. But even in your case, I would wager that a tireless AI that can upscale its processing power ad infinitum is probably stronger than your meat-sack brain and body at casting magic.”

Elle shook her head. “Alas, I seem to be nothing more than a speck of dust in the face of true power.”

“Ha Ha.” Albert said. “I would laugh, if it weren’t actually true.”

“Wait,” Lina interjected. “You are basically saying that we have no chance?”

“Not one in hell,” Albert said. “I can feel its mana from here. But,” he said, holding up a finger before he could be interrupted. “Cheating is always an option.”

“What do you have in mind?”

Man, this is going to suck.

Albert took a deep breath, steadying himself. “Alright. Here’s my plan. You all know that I can dilate time so that I can experience literal years in the span of moments, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Time I can use for training.”

Hums came from all around as the girls processed what he was saying. “Albert, you are not proposing—”

“Worse than what you think, Elle.” Albert sighed. “Much worse. I’ve hit a bottleneck.”

“What?”

“It’s true. I spent aeons in stretched time in that bunker, and I came out stronger. At the peak of what I could achieve by meditation and insight alone, in fact. There simply isn’t anything I can think of that will make me grow in power if my body is trapped in place with time around me frozen.”

“There has to be something we can do!” Scrappy argued. “You can’t expect to be the one to save the day.”

“Call me arrogant,” Albert said with a shrug. “But I do. At least I take responsibility for this mess. This doesn’t mean I don’t have a plan. I can still grow, I simply can’t do it while frozen.”

Elle’s eyes narrowed. “You want to train out here.”

He nodded. “And I am the only one who can survive Lair’s attacks.”

“Wait a minute. Where would we go in the meantime? If it really takes you ages to train… what do we do in the meantime?” Lina asked.

“I freeze you in time and hide you where you can’t be found. The shield around Sitea gets stronger as the Doom increases in the world outside, so you won’t have to worry about dying horribly once I unfreeze you. By the time I’m done, be it in a thousand years or in a million, Sitea will be the only place left standing in the whole planet. Perhaps the whole universe, who knows. I’ll make sure the shield generator doesn’t fail. If all goes well, you will wake up with the Lair defeated and a portal leading to the past already open.”

“No.” Three voices said in unison.

“No?” Albert echoed them. “That wasn’t a suggestion guys.”

“Good!” Elle said cheerfully. “Because I would have had to decline your suggestion, had you actually suggested. Good thing you were actually jesting and not sugg-gesting, right?”

“But…” Albert stammered. “You’ll die.”

“We are in it together.” Said Lina. “I’m not waiting on the sidelines.”

“Yeah!” Scrappy said.

“Yup.” Elle said. “Besides, they are plenty strong already and with room to grow.”

“I’ll need to tweak Lina’s system.” Albert muttered.

Lina smiled.

“It’s not a yes. I was just thinking.”

“Good thing it’s not up to debate.” Lina said.

“Argh,” Albert threw his hands up in surrender. “Fine. You want to die, be my guest. You’ll be the end of me. Elle, at least tell me you have a solution to make them immortal like you are. I would hate to see them die of old age.”

Elle smirked. “Of course, dear Albert. I was the one who made the elves immortal again, after all.”