“No matter, keep searching.” Master Liaoran assured everyone.
The team paused only briefly from the initial surprise of the knockin figure before they proceeded to do what they came here for: to find out as much information about the building as possible and to sabotage their internal defense system as much as possible.
“Marcus?” Gloria called out with a frown as she pried open a sealed locker box: “Do you know what this is?”
Marcus came over in an instant, just in time to see Gloria raise an old black and white photo of a sword-like structure. When he took a closer look, it appeared to be an entire piece of stone, carved into the shape of a sword. A sword without a sharp edge, and with a shorter, symmetrical blade in comparison with the size of the handle.
“I - I don’t know what this is called.” Marcus scratched his head.
This also attracted the attention of Tae Kuo, who opened his eyes wide and said: “This looks just like that thing we got from the walls of - ”
“It’s a sword plate, or a sword pillar. ” Master Liaoran answered just after one look from a distance: “It’s an old way of creating pillars without actually using living humans. Many could consider the art of carving powerful symbols on sword plates the origin of talisman making.”
“But why would they hide - ” Tae Kuo frowned, then shook his head: “Nevermind, not important right now. Master, do you know if they had them here in the cores of the array?”
“It is to be expected.” Master Liaoran nodded: “Especially when using the right kind of stones with the best compatible wooden case. This monk would expect nothing less from inside of an array this size.”
“Who are you?! Who are you?! What are you doing here!?” Just this moment, two gurgling voices came through the hole on the ground, two guards walked to the position right underneath the hole. At the same time, they looked up with dilated, unfocused eyes.
“Open up! Open up!” Two more figures appeared outside the door, both of whom seemed to be wearing similar outfits. Now there were three of them, all of whom were pounding at the door with similar frequencies and force while uttering pretty much the same demands. “If you still don’t open, I’ll shoot this door open! Open up right now!”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Who are you?!” The two guards from below somehow floated upwards and reached their hands through the hole on the ground. Their pale gray fingers grabbed the edge of the hole, and began pulling themselves up.
“Fuck off!” Keryn hopped over and swung her arm at one of the guards’ wrists. The guard did not react at all, and took this directly without even flinching. Keryn almost bounced up into the ceiling after a brittle crack.
The guard’s wrists were flattened by this one strike, the bones were all fractured into tiny splinters, many of which poked out of his skin. His facial expression did not change at all. His eyes fixed on Keryn and Kevin as the skin holding his arms and his hands together stretched and broke off, dropping him to the floor below.
“Their bones are all weak and brittle. I did not do that.” Keryn pushed her Qi into her hand to burn off some gray smoke she caught after the strike: “That guy - he was almost hollow inside.”
“Who are you?! What are you doing here!?” The other guard still with his hands on the edge of the hole had pulled himself up enough to poke his face at everyone’s ankles. By the time he glanced through half the people in this room, his eyes had already begun to melt, his face and his arms had shriveled, and his hairs half grayed.
Master Liaoran shot at this guard, his right hand formed a single-hand seal and bashed the guard right on his forehead. The guard’s helmet broke and exploded into dozens of pieces. A golden symbol was slapped onto his forehead. A desperate cry and moan came from his open mouth, before his fingers and arms lost the strength to support his body.
When the first guard fell down, his body broke and splashed like a balloon filled with foul dark red liquid, tar and pieces of light yellow pellets. And when the second guard fell, his head exploded. Red hot flames burst from this explosion and the guard’s body, igniting the filth poured from the first guard.
A screech full of anger and grudge blasted through the hallway below, as if someone was just dealt a heavy and painful blow.
“Too many foul beings inhabit this place. What we just did seemed to have set them free.” Master Liaoran frowned: “What else did you find? And is there anything we could break?”
“This is kind of a bad news, but the computers all went down, at least from what I can tell, they’re all fried.” Mick sighed and shook his head: “This means that whatever defense system these computers are in charge of would be down as well. But it also means that we cannot actually use them to gain access to other defense systems - I mean, I just realized this now, but if I were to design the system, I would design a few separate layers and not be centralized in one place.”
“No matter, we will deal with them when we get to it.” Master Liaoran nodded.
“Open up! Open up!” The figures outside the door were still banging on it. Different from the guards below, they were much stronger than even a normal man, and the steel door frame and metal door creaked and whined from their attempts to break in.
“I found something!” Just this moment, Tae Kuo raised his right hand up, tucked in his fingers was a small piece of paper card - one that was blank and light blue in color. “This is - this is an unfinished talisman!”
“Indeed it is.” Master Liaoran accepted it from Tae Kuo, and with a little bit of his Qi and blood infused into it, a simple map of red appeared on its surface: “Looks like a map to a safe room in this building. It’s close to our path down.”