“Ladies, gentlemen, what do you have for me?” Jack said as he stood amidst the crowd of officials taken aback. “Well? I don’t have all day, someone want to speak or am I going to have to torture someone for information?”
Suddenly a floating prosthetic elbow found Jack’s side, followed by an angry Selfia pulling him to the side.
“What are you doing?!” Selfia hissed. “Where are your clothes?!”
“Attending a meeting about the great plan I wasn’t privy to,” Jack replied, pulling away with a glare of his one good eye as Kamila suddenly appeared and handed him an intellipad, “Are we going to start this?”
Selfia closed her eyes, taking a moment to compose herself before addressing the crowd of officers and delegates.
“Right, now that we are here. I would like to thank everyone for taking the trip to meet under such dire circumstances, I know-”
“Selfia,” Jack interjected, his eye down at the dossier in his hand that seemed to display everything gathered so far on the High Table and the ongoing fight, “Get to the point. Time is of the essence.”
At his demand, Jack received a glare from Selfia, followed by Python inhaling as he pretended not to notice Jack’s behavior.
“-Right,” Selfia let out. “I’ll be brief, everyone here has been given a dossier of our situation, so we all know the current state of the world and how fucked everything is. We know who's responsible, what their goal is, and how to fix our world. But, we don’t know where the leader is-”
Kamila rolled in a massive white screen, one large enough to capture enough of the briefing for the crowd to see.
“-Which we are working on,” Selfia continued as one of her many floating arms moved to align the projector nearby, “Combining the intel obtained by our resident Angels here, satellite imagining, and my Black Hearts, we have pinpointed large movements of equipment and personnel into the port city of Zanzibar. Which, given our current situation, wouldn’t be uncommon for an influx and stockpiling of manpower and arms. However, a few months ago we lost contact with the port city of Zanzibar, an oddity considering they had little to no demonspawn traffic and were firmly on the outskirts of Imperial territory. With all this, we’ve managed to identify the chief enforcer of the High Table, Dorian Jazz as the Red Rook.”
An image of a man with metallic add-ons to his face appeared on screen alongside aerial images of a large city.
At five-six with brown hair and red eyes, the man was as ordinary as any other imperial citizen save for his cybernetics and the distinct hollowed look in his eyes that most soldiers tended to have.
Jack eyed his dossier, reading up on the man’s information as quickly as it passed.
“A former imperial commander under my mother’s regime, Dorian Jazz served in the Seventh Solomon Expeditions which have been uncovered to have been organized search parties for the High Table using our collective nation’s resources,” Selfia paused, sweeping her eyes across the crowd, “We believe he is gathering resources and personnel to organize another expedition into the Forgotten Continent now that most of the demonspawn and apostles that inhabited it are flooding our shores. Our objective is to apprehend Dorian Jazz and seize their boats, potentially taking down the Black King as well-yes?”
One of the cyborgs raised a metallic hand, a brunette woman Jack vaguely recognized with her thick alliance accent familiar, “Why are we taking their ships?”
“The miasma in the air disrupts our skyships,” Mi’shka said, the officer joining the conversation with a set of fresh imperial army fatigues that he handed to Jack in passing.
“This is Colonel Mi’shka Domino, a veteran of the Forgotten Continent with well over a dozen combat sorties and recon missions under General Solomon, he will be leading the expedition force,” Selfia introduced, stepping to the side as the heterochromatic man stood at the front of the crowd in his freshly ironed colonel’s uniform.
“Pardon my crassness,” Mi’shka flashed a small smile at Jack as he spoke, “The forgotten continent is a shit-hole land choked with corruption and demonspawn. That means any non-awakened soldier not being constantly supplied with filters will die within seconds and obsifiter generators and anything that feeds on mana will be starved. That means Mechframes will shutdown, airships will stall, awakened will be poisoned with prolonged exposure, and even bots get shorted. The forgotten continent is aptly named because it's so terrible everyone wants to forget it exists.”
“Hence the boats,” Selfia continued, “Expeditions into the continent are a logistics nightmare, even my satellites can’t image through the smog. To make matters worst the empire doesn’t keep a heavy stock of seafaring craft as there hasn’t been a need considering our landlocked nation. So this operation will be multi-faceted in nature. Seize the city of Zanzibar, interrogate the Red Rook, and capture the boats. The latter of which is essential to our survival.”
“So what do you require from the alliance?” A red-haired cyborg asked, raising his brow. From the look of him, he was no older than Jack which made him an oddity within the crowd of gray-haired officers and aristocrats.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Supplies.”
“Due to the crisis, the Empire’s current stockpile of filters and armyrtheium is enough for a division of soldiers to journey into the Forgotten land for an estimated forty minutes without resupply. We can, at best have an airship in the air for an hour before the corruption eats away our shields and stalls our airship. That isn’t enough. Judging from our previous expeditions, the subject of the High Table’s fascination is located beyond the scope of our previous surveys or within the boundaries of our seventh expedition. Which means outside the limits of our supplies.”
“You want us to give up our stores of armyrtheium?” The redheaded man said with Selfia sighing as Jack dropped his towel and began to get dressed despite the crowd now more focused on him.
“Nice,” Mi’shka smirked.
“And convert landships for sea-faring operations,” Selfia continued despite the disruption, “Once we’ve interrogated the Red Rook and pinpointed a location, we’ll need everything and more to reach the infinity machine.”
The brunette cyborg shook her head, “That's a lot to ask of us on conjecture. You don’t even know where their objective is or if this Machine thing is the answer to our red sun problem. Unlike the empire, there's nowhere for us to run when our cities get breached.”
“It is,” Sahaqiel butted in, the angel having passively been observing the conversations.
“And how do you know this?” The red-haired man said, drawing the ire of the paladins in the room. Including Lita. “I get that you’re supposed to be a super-powered ancient angel and all, but how do we know what you say is true?”
A radiant warmth filled the air, powerful mana that raised the hairs on everyone’s body with Jack’s soul seeming to stir.
“Because I was there when the machine was created. The infinity machine taps into all data flow. What you call mana is just data, the molecules of molecules are read by the machine and translated, allowing each and every one of us to be connected,” Sahaqiel explained as her body began to shimmer with an almost ethereal glow, “Think of it like a computer, the Infinity machine is one giant server and router that moves data around the world. During the original outbreak, we used the machine to halt the flow of mana in the world and reverse it, pulling in a specific spectrum of data that eliminated those who exhibited mana capability.”
Jack frowned, a hush falling on the crowd as they processed what the angel had said.
Eliminated.
“You want us to go and wipe out all awakened in the world?” Jack asked, breaking the silence.
“No, today's awakened and the awakened of the past are different. In the past, we used a broad spectrum targeting sequence because we weren’t sure of what we were dealing with and couldn’t risk the rest of humanity succumbing to the disaster. So we had no choice but to rob them of their potential and eliminate those who had the genes to produce more true-awakened.”
Jack furrowed his brow, there was something more, something else that Sahaqiel wasn’t saying, yet the implication of her words put a heavy strain on Jack’s heart. If angels and demonspawn were going to be wiped out…
“So then if you eliminated them how is it they are back? How is it you exist?” The brunette cyborg asked, drawing all eyes.
“If the infinity machine is a computer, that means it has storage. There’s a limit to how much it can hold and process. As the eons passed, the data it collected began to build up pressure, almost like a cork with it leaking. And like any machine without maintenance, it began to falter, releasing more and more of the corruptive code leading to our current situation,” Sahaqiel said, glossing over the woman’s last question and turning to Selfia. “With what I’ve learned from being in a vessel of a multitude of souls, and the research obtained from the High Table, I believe we can not wipe out the demonspawn threat, but also repair the Infinity Machine so such a disaster never occurs again.”
“But to do that we need to locate where the enemy is going,” Selfia said as she took a cookie from Kamila handing them out to the guests. “The Red Rook will have that information.”
“And if they decide to blow up their boats? Delete their intel? What then?” An imperial nobleman asked.
“If the Red Rook is brought to me alive he’ll tell us everything we need to know,” Jack cut in, leaning on a nearby wall with his arms crossed.
“Torture probably isn’t going to work,” The red-haired cyborg smirked, almost condescending as if dismissing Jack as some edgelord.
“It isn’t torture what I do,” Jack replied, causing the trio of alliance delegates to look at one another in amusement. “It’s worst. I grab onto their soul and I read their memories. Sometimes if I don’t like them, I pick out the dark bits and force them into an eternal nightmare that plays on repeat but on fast-forward. A minute to us is a hundred thousand to them, permanently reliving their worst memories until they kill themselves usually.”
“So, yeah,” Selfia added, chopping up the uncomfortable atmosphere, “If we apprehend the Red Rook, we’ll have what we need to intercept the Black King’s plans.”
“We’ll see what we can do,” The red-haired cyborg said, “We’re still trying to stabilize things as is, many on the board think we can just wait out the crisis, most aren’t even aware of the massive swarms surface side.”
“Just give us what you can. Its not like we’re talking about the fate of the world after all,” Selfia said sarcastically before clapping her prosthetics together as Kamila rolled in a cart of food alongside Granny Cao and several of the elders of the Hoshido who gave Jack a warm smile upon seeing him, “Okay! Who is hungry, lets eat while we discuss our plans.”
Selfia turned to beckon Jack to sit beside her yet upon doing so the space he once inhabited was void, the man-turned-angel already gone with Sahaqiel nowhere to be seen as well.
“Great… no one has any decorum,” Selfia sighed to herself.
“That went better than expected,” Python said, handing Selfia a plate. “Maybe it would have been better to just tell him.”
“No, I know I made the right decision, he could never do what needed to be done, not when it involves family,” Selfia said, looking down at the steamy white rice and fish on her porcelain plate. “That's why I wanted to kill his sister before they met. To spare them the suffering.”
Python remained silent, the dutiful soldier turning away as he eyed the delegates eating lavishly. A telltale sign to all soldiers just how fucked everything was about to become.