Truth snuck through the lowest level of the once secret, now besieged volcano lair with a loopy grin. All the blessings, the concealment magic, the specialist training, and what does it take to evade the world’s best mercs? Stand behind the door. They’ll never find you.
No trolls so far. That was a relief. They were uncomfortably sharp. The doors on this floor were, for lack of a better way to describe them, more heavy duty than the ones on the second floor. They had the solidity of steel core doors, much more elaborate locks and, he was quietly surprised to see, mechanical deadbolts. If the magic failed, the door wouldn’t open. Now, did the hard working employees of the Security Division want to keep people out even in an emergency- or did they want to keep something in?
He moved quickly through the hallways, trying to get a feel for the size of the floor. A little bigger than the second floor, but only a bit bigger, based on the length of the hallways. Which made sense- if he were building a secret underground lair, there would be an external wall made of the most pressure and heat resistant material he could lay hands on, then he would build inside the sheath.
The scuff marks lead him to a notably banged up door. The frame had been scraped badly by passing equipment and careless soldiers. Promising. Truth hesitated. Job number one was “rescue the Shattervoid Princess.” A job that would be massively easier if the guards were out of the picture. On the other hand, booby trapping the barracks would not catch ALL the guards, and it would alarm the high levels. Force them to look inward, instead of focusing on the attacks from outside.
He hesitated for a minute, but opted to pass on the barracks for now. He looked up and down the hallway. You don’t stick the barracks right next to the place you want to protect. You need space to work with. Soldiers need to assemble, set up defenses, need room to fall back if necessary. So if the Barracks were here, and there were conspicuously marked patches of wall and floor that way…
He trotted down the hall, looking at the rooms as he passed. Bypassing any that gave Incisive a jolt of alarm. Those high levels had to be living somewhere. It seemed a few of them were at home down here. That made things a little exciting.
Truth picked a safe feeling room to try and break in. There just wasn’t enough foot traffic down here to let him peek over shoulders. The good news was that he was intimately familiar with all these locks, as they were all Starbrite manufactured products. The better news was that people hadn't screwed around with them to improve their resistance to attacks. Apparently they were more concerned about controlling access.
The actually-very-bad news was that they were all directly tied to a magical network that, Truth assumed, reported directly to the System Astrologica. Every time that door opened and closed, there would be a record of it. There would be a record of who, exactly, opened it, and which sigils entered the room at that time, etc. So the job wasn’t just to crack the lock. He also had to spoof the connection to the System.
A lot of very finicky work later, Truth was quietly swearing in frustration. The mechanism was quite straightforward. When the door was closed, two runes almost-not-quite touched to form an elaborate three dimensional rune. When the door opened, the rune was broken, which triggered a talisman in the doorframe. The talisman checked with the lock-
“Were you opened properly? Yes? Then I will send a message to the intelligent spirit saying that I have been opened properly, and another to the Identity Confirmation talisman inside the room, just to double check that the person who unlocked the door was the same as the person or people who went into the room.”
And if some part of the chain broke down, it would scream for help.
Which was fine. Which was all very standard. Same basic principles applied to almost any door lock. Which was the problem.
“Five. Years. FIVE! And they STILL HAVEN’T CHANGED THE RUNE!” Truth was managing the tricky feat of shouting under his breath. He dug out two bits of paper, a little careful drawing and the careful application of spit as glue, some very delicate tweezer work and as far as both the door and the alarm talisman were concerned, the door was firmly shut.
Cracking the lock was laughably simple by comparison. He had been studying the damn systems half his life. Come glorious day, I’m going to be off-world and run into non-Starbrite model talismans. Oh the universes of possibility that will open up.
The door opened with a click. The whole process had taken twenty minutes. Now that he had confirmed how the mechanisms were set up, the next one would take less than five. The one after that? He fully expected to have the process down to sub- one minute in the near future. Five goddamn years. Update. The damn. Locks.
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No. They push out new editions of the lock with a different looking case and maybe fixing some of the more obvious attacks, but they never, ever, update a line that’s still in production. But they could. They totally could. In FIVE GODDAMN YEARS, they could have fixed a half dozen problems. Even making the runes more complicated would help. “Master” tier locks my entire ass.
The room was, in fact, a laboratory. One that was apparently in active use, as there was a box with a glass door that was humming with magic. Something bobbed in a column of light on a bench top. More things were in cases scattered over yet more bench space.
Truth didn’t have the faintest idea what any of these things were. Locks he knew. This stuff? Strictly for the natural philosophy types. But where there were natural philosophers, there would be notes.
He started checking through the room, carefully looking at every scrap. He wasn’t expecting to hit it immediately. He might not hit it at all. But he had nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do. So he patiently sifted through the rows of numbers, the illegible scribbles, the half worked out diagrams of different star alignments and alchemical reagents.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
At a guess they were… trying to make something resistant to certain types of cosmic energy? Truth looked blankly at the page. He knew you could attune cosmic energy to certain frequencies or principals. A lot of the body cultivation manuals promised exactly that- an “eternal wood” physique, or a lightening aligned body, or light. Gave benefits to movement speed or exorcism or lifespan. All thanks to tweaking your internal cosmic energy for a more specialized role.
Truth hadn't bothered with any of that. He had just used the most basic and generic energy. Likely, in retrospect, because the System Astrologica wanted to encourage him to think he was too stupid and poor to be trusted with anything more complicated.
Truth looked at his strong hand and slowly flexed it. He wouldn’t have achieved a fraction of what he had if he had been locked into a narrow path. He would not have seen through so many mysteries. He would not be on the path of redefining reality, if he was content to redefine the magic within him.
He smiled slowly. Keep underestimating him. Keep telling him that he was trash. Generational trash. Hell, who knows how many of his reincarnations had been complete moron scumbags. But he kept coming back. Learning. Getting stronger. He silently laughed.
Dr. Sun. He wondered why such a powerhouse seemed so weak. It was because he had specialized his energy into some kind of immortality magic. He had poured all his ability into keeping himself alive, then others. He was a specialist. A powerful one, but a specialist. In ordinary times, a specialist was worth ten thousand mongrels like Truth. But here, at the end of days?
The strongest man in the world was spending his fortune and the lives of specialists to figure out how to do something Truth could manage with a bit of meditation and time. And Starbrite was no fool. There was a good reason for him to spend the resources. So Starbrite probably grew up in a good place, in ordinary times, before he came to this world. Starbrite was “smart.” He was a specialist.
Truth smiled, shaking with laughter now. The most powerful man in the world invented the System Astrologica precisely because he knew his own weakness. An insanely powerful, insanely complex answer to a fundamental problem. And here was Truth, Slumrat Adventurer, solving complicated problems with radical simplicity.
Hey, Valentinian? Whoever you are, wherever you are, thank you. I will take your manual and walk straight to the Godhead, shattering the evil illusions of the “real” as I go.
The next few rooms were more of the same- more laboratories, more examinations of some minute detail who’s function largely escaped truth’s understanding. He did not know what a mercury exhalation was, or why it was important, or for that matter, why the room stank like rotten eggs. It was some kind of alchemy thing, judging by all the little crucibles and kilns, but beyond that, he wouldn’t dare to guess.
The PMC guards had returned. They sounded tired but not unhappy. Things must have worked out. No prisoners either. Truth kept well out of their way. He was perfectly content listening through the door.
“Hey, Sarge, we don’t have a patrol rotation now, right?”
“Yeah, you get the rest of the day off. The other platoons get to pick up the slack.”
“Nice!”
“Got a date tonight?” There was a high degree of sarcasm in the question, all of which apparently went right over the merc’s head.
“Hell yeah, me and this guy from Prototyping hit it off. I’m gonna pick him up after work, then it’s back to his place for-”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Err. Sarge, you kind of did.”
There was a moment of quiet.
“You know, it occurs to me that our talismans and gear haven’t been inventoried and maintained in a long while. I think they might need urgent attention. The kind that could take all night if done properly.”
“I apologize for my mistake. I am clearly oversharing.”
“Mmm. Scram.”
Truth dithered. He had no idea what time it was, or when “after work” was. Hanging out in the lab next to the barracks, peeking out at every person walking down the hall, looking for a solitary female merc in search of company did not appeal. But he really wanted to find out where Prototyping was.
The dithering intensified, then Truth just gave up. He sighed, sat down, and started cultivating. It still felt a little too soon for it, but he knew he would be frequently interrupted. He would be a little productive as he waited. Never dumb to be stronger. And Level Five was more than a little bit stronger.
It took a few hours, and several passing patrols, but eventually a Level Three merc, female and hopeful looking, stepped out. She had invested a little in a cosmetic glamor, or maybe it was the potion that permanently made you prettier. Truth remembered that thing. Harmony wound up drinking it. The fancy glass bottle was on display in their apartment permanently afterwards.
She walked off confidently down the hall, then up the stairs to the first floor. Truth shrugged. Seems he had guessed wrong about which end to start with. Down some halls to a thick set of double doors. The doors opened into an absolute killing field of hidden weaponry, with a fully kitted up squad dug in behind emplaced enchantments. They also, Truth noticed with morbid amusement, carried machetes. Just in case.
No trolls or demons though, so that was a small mercy.
“Hey fuckwit, got a chair? I don’t want to stand around like a hooker waiting for my date.” She grinned at the squaddies.
“You are going to need to be more specific. I have at least four fuckwits here. And don’t worry, nobody would mistake you as someone who gets paid for sex. Pays for it, sure. There’s a face that screams “Whorehopper.”
The corporal smiled with gentle warmth and, in a friendly manner, flung a heavy wooden chair at her head. She snagged it out of the air one handed and sat with boneless comfort.
“Going to do bad things to that man. Dinner first, him developing a permanent limp later.”
“You have the soul of a poet, Sharon. One that scribbles shit on the walls while they try to remember how to take a dump without drowning.”
“Always nice to have something to read on the can. Those people do a public service.”
Truth waited with limited patience, staring at the door. On the other side was whatever Starbrite was working on. And with any luck, the Princess he was here to save.