Chapter 158 - The Omni Core, Mk. I
Jack shot his harpoon through a gray, floating orb that was zipping through the air, firing every type of magic available at him.
“Get over here, you fucking asshole,” he said as the knife pierced straight through it. He gripped the chain in both hands and brought it down hard, slamming it into the ground and shattering it into a hundred tiny pieces.
You Have Slain Omni Floater Golem
+250,000 AP
Jack shot his other harpoon directly ahead of him, but the hulking gray golem batted it aside before it could pierce through him. The golem stood eight feet tall and was made out of a gray metal. Its only discernible feature was the giant void in its head that was capable of firing a devastating laser of every type of magic under the sun. Its head burned bright red as it charged another laser blast that chased after Jack, carving deep rents into the ground. Jack whirled past, narrowly avoiding it as he slammed both daggers into the golem’s chest repeatedly. It seemed wholly unbothered by his attack as it wrapped its arms around him.
“Help, damn it!” Jack screamed as his back started cracking.
A spear of ice slammed into the void hole that made up the golem’s face, staggering the beast. Jack let out a scream as he released a hundred lightning strikes, tearing the golem to pieces with his daggers. It fell to the ground, lifeless as Jack ripped through its torso one final time.
You have Slain Omni Golem Guardian
+500,000 AP
He leaned against the wall, panting heavily and glancing down the long hallway. Dozens upon dozens of the golems lay dead. He spotted Karlisle and Mortimaxx strolling idly down the drab gray halls that were dimly lit with flickering overhead lights.
“You two,” Jack said, gritting his teeth, “really need to start pulling your weight.”
“I do better when my opponents are filled with blood.” Karlisle shrugged.
“And I’m not particularly strong at the moment. The city is only in danger level one.”
“Yeah, but you also can’t die, asshole. Neither of you can!” Jack screamed.
They both looked at each other and burst out laughing. “That’s right, I almost forgot!” Mortimaxx said, bending over and slapping his knee.
Jack rolled his eyes and stomped off.
“Oh, don’t be so mad! We’re almost there! I think,” Mortimaxx said, still laughing.
Jack had originally thought of the two as long-lost lovers or something like that. It turned out that they were just two best friends. All solemnity and seriousness seemed lost on them, and they spent most of the journey just talking and catching up with each other. Jack was ready to strangle them both, because more than once since arriving in this hellhole, they had left Jack to fight the billion and one golem robot assholes that haunted this place.
Jack didn’t know what he was expecting from them. Maybe some reverence or at least some guidance. He stepped up to another crossroads and glanced back. “Which way?” he called out to Mortimaxx.
“Left. Should be dead ahead from there.”
Jack paused a moment to wait for the two of them to catch up. It had been a full day of this, really. He glanced at the shiny metal double doors at the end of the hall.
If Jack had to describe Andurian’s secret base, “the world’s most boring spaceship” would be among the words he chose. Everything was a drab, monotone gray, backlit by white, fluorescent lights. Every room that wasn’t completely destroyed or blown to all hell looked like a high school science lab. With every door Jack opened, he had been thoroughly disappointed.
“I’ve already looted the place clean eons ago. Well, almost everything,” Mortimaxx admitted after Jack complained.
The trio stepped up to the double doors, and they automatically slid open.
The room on the other side was huge. Jack glanced at the far side of the wall and saw several containers just like the one that had the core module inside. Most were broken, but some seemed to still be glowing with a core. There were several metal surgical tables on the other end, as well as a large corner desk with filing cabinets that had documents spilling out.
Jack took one step inside and froze.
The room started rumbling, and Jack traced it to its source. A large, gray liquid seeped out of the floor and rose into the air, like a fountain of water that poured upwards. It coalesced into a pulsating metal orb that hummed angrily in the middle of the room. Slowly, the orb began to take shape. First, two legs shot out of the bottom. Then an arm that ended in a hand curled into an angry fist. Its other hand took the shape of a sword.
It looked just like the golem he had been fighting before, only this one was eighteen feet tall, with its head almost scraping the ceiling. The large hole in its head began to glow an angry, deep blue.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Jack sighed.
“Now!” Mortimaxx commanded.
A blood-red blur whipped past him, circling around the leg of the golem like a tornado and tearing it to shreds. The golem fell to its side as the leg collapsed, and the shot it was charging went wide, burning a hole through the ceiling. Mortimaxx stepped forward, stomping on the ground and sending a cascading nova of ice spikes ripping up out of the ground and slamming through the golem.
At no point did Karlisle stop shredding the golem to pieces. Once the head was on the ground, he set to ripping it apart as Mortimaxx sent ice spears the size of tree trunks ripping through the golem.
They killed it, and the titanic monster faded away before Jack could even get a blow in. Mortimaxx turned back to Jack with a grin on his face. “Sorry for making you do all the heavy lifting. This thing is always hard to kill, and I needed to make sure we had enough energy.”
“It respawns?” Jack asked.
Mortimaxx nodded. “Every single time. Was quite the surprise on my second visit.”
Jack stared at the now-dead golem for a half second, and then got angry. “Next time, at least let me tag the boss before you kill it. I feel like I might have missed out on a skill point or something.”
“Unlikely, at least not with us two helping you. Maybe if you fought against it yourself…” Karlisle offered.
Jack bit back an angry retort, turning his attention back to the dead golem.
The body turned back into the gray metal goo and slowly receded back into the ground. A loud clicking noise rang out through the room. In the dead center, a new contraception whirred to life. The metal plates in the floor raised slightly and slid themselves to the side. Locks unlatching and gears turning could be heard as a square pedestal rose from the ground.
At the top of the pedestal was a floating orb that glowed a blinding white. Jack stepped closer for a better look. The blinding glow simmered as the true shape of the object revealed itself. It wasn’t quite what Jack was expecting. It was a baseball-sized orb encased in glass and fused to the top of a large, chrome-colored spike. Inside the orb was a machine of sorts, with whirring gears and pumping pistons that seemed to phase in and out of reality. A white hot magical glow radiated off the hundreds of tiny pieces, making it almost impossible to discern just what the purpose of such delicate mechanics might be.
Jack inspected it, his heart pounding in his chest.
Omni Core Mk. I.
Type: Core
Tier: Epic
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
*****
Product of Andurian
Jack stared in disbelief for a long moment. His smile slowly faded, and he turned to Mortimaxx and Karlisle, who were staring at him.
“How do I use it?” Jack asked. “There isn’t a prompt or anything.”
“I don’t know,” Mortimaxx admitted, looking a little forlorn.
“Let me have a look around. That desk looks promising,” Karlisle said, pointing at the corner desk with the overflowing file cabinets and documents scattered all around it. Mortimaxx went to join him, leaving Jack alone with the Omni Core.
It was hot to the touch when he grabbed it. He tried everything he could think of: pressing it against his empty core, holding it really tight while meditating. Praying to it. Rubbing it really fast. Rubbing it really slowly. Licking it. Then he moved on to more volatile methods, first trying and failing to snap it in half and break off the ominous-looking spike thing. He decided that the baseball-sized orb that was swirling with an energy source was obviously the core part. The energy inside looked very much like the kind of energy that appeared whenever a soul oath was broken and someone was about to get a huge Tower buff. He did not like that one singular bit. Still, the most concerning part was the spike it was seemingly stuck to, and he wanted to get rid of it.
“What are you doing,” Mortimaxx screamed as Jack chucked it as hard he could against the wall. The Omni Core bounced off and slid across the floor with several loud tinks, completely unharmed.
“Percussive maintenance usually works on things like this,” Jack said, staring angrily at the core on the floor. Finally, he cut his palm open and bled all over it. That was a mistake, as their vampire companion instantly lost his mind and he and Mortimaxx had to beat down Karlisle.
“Apologies. Please, warn before doing anything like that again,” the vampire said as he regained some modicum of control over himself.
Jack rolled his eyes at Karlisle and abandoned his attempts at figuring out how to use the core, instead turning to exploring the lab. Mortimaxx wasn’t lying when he said he had looted the place clean. It was almost completely barren. On the far side of the room several glass vials lined the wall, several broken. They were all core modules like the lightning core module he had.
He let his eyes drift over the modules. Brightly colored orbs danced inside their containers, eager to be set free. There was a water core, a grass core, a blade core, a rage core, a frost core, another lightning core even, the list went on. Jack stared at the modules, wondering how the hell Andurian could have made these in the first place. He sighed, and turned back to Karlisle and Mortimaxx.
“Any luck?” Jack asked, throwing the Omni Core paperweight onto the desk and leaning against the wall, sliding down to the floor.
“Not really. There is this one interesting bit here, but it’s more curious than helpful,” Karlisle said, picking up a piece of paper.
“What’s it say?”
“The gods are cruel,” he started reading from the paper. “So far as I can tell, there is no safe way to remove one’s core. It appears to be designed that way as a defense mechanism against people like me and my ambitions. Little do they understand to what lengths I will go…”
“From there, the writing fades out and becomes illegible, but it picks up again on the next page.”
“…My acolytes are cowards, all of them. I’ve developed a system that will force on them a choice. If they truly want power, then they must show true commitment. The core self-destruct is admittedly a cruel method, but they simply refuse to rip their cores free of their own volition. I’ve designed a ritual of sorts. Once the core self-destruct has been activated, it cannot be stopped. They must choose: rip out their cores, or return to nothing. None have been successful…”
“I didn’t know he was so cruel,” Karlisle said, looking up from the sheet of paper at Jack. “Is that what happened to you?”
“More or less, although mine was slightly less intentional. I didn’t know I was taking part in some weird ritual. I just needed a bomb.” Jack shrugged.
“That sounds like an interesting story,” Mortimaxx said.
Jack just nodded, staring at the Omni Core on the desk. Something about the brutality of the whole thing was scratching some part of his brain. The core wasn’t meant to be removed, and if you tried, you were more likely to die in the process.
“Why do you think it has a spike on it?” Jack asked, squinting at the core. “Do cores come in different shapes? Like could this just be the shape of an Omni Core?”
“No,” they both answered.
“I was afraid of that,” Jack sighed, standing up and grabbing the Omni Core. He tested the tip with his thumb. It was sharper than he was expecting, machined to deadly perfection.
Jack let out a long sigh, staring at the core. “You may have to leave the room for this next part, Karl.”
“What? Why?” he asked, standing up and walking over to Jack.
Jack glanced over at the metal medical examination tables that lined the wall. “I wonder if those were meant for recovery,” he said more to himself. He went and sat on the edge of one, his eyes never leaving the Omni Core.
Fuck, he thought to himself. Fuckfuckfuck.
He fished out a healing potion from his void sack. It was one of Nutt’s shitty ones. He glared at Mortimaxx. “It’s your fault I wasted my last good health potion, you know.”
“What are you talking about? What are you going to do?”
“Just make sure Karlisle doesn’t eat me.” Jack said one final time before putting them both out of his mind.
The core was gift wrapped in a delivery system. That was the only thing that seemed to make sense.
He gripped the core by the circular part, leveling the spike at his chest. He raised it high in the air, and screamed, plunging it into his stomach, just above the navel, where his core used to be.
All the air immediately left his body, and he blacked out from the pain for a split second. He awoke, gushing blood from his stomach and mouth, the core halfway plunged inside of himself. He gritted his teeth until they cracked and kept pushing. The metal spike immediately turned into a liquid and seeped into his body, but not before grabbing the circular core and pulling it the rest of the way inside.
The only way he could describe the pain was it felt like a metal spider made of knives was rearranging the inside of his body.
He tried to focus on the core while gasping for air that wouldn’t come. He couldn’t think past the pain, but that was only the beginning. He couldn’t see what was happening, but he could feel it. There was a raging vortex in the center of his body.
It didn’t stop there though. As the metal rampaged in his body and a vortex swirled angrily, a third sensation entered the mix. The metal started messing with his mana channels. It felt like someone was pulling on a loose thread on a shirt. Only instead of a shirt, it was his body. He felt a tightness in his arms, then his leg, then his head and eyes as it pulled on his channels and threw the loose ends into the vortex. He had been turned into a marionette, and was flailing around on the ground as his channels were pulled on from every singular direction, all leading to the swirling mechanical monstrosity at his center. It felt like he was being sucked into his own core from the inside out.
His mind turned to dread and despair as his body crumpled in on itself, collapsing like a dying star.
He remembered the health potion he had pulled out and tried to climb up to the metal bed. He grabbed the vial, but another spike of pain and his hand convulsed. The potion shattered in his grip and spilled out all over the floor.
Jack fell back into the fetal position. He was no longer able to form coherent thoughts. He was well past the point of burying the pain deep down and ignoring it. Instead, he focused on one thing and one thing alone: the absolute hatred that roiled in his heart. The rage he felt when he thought of Gideon. How desperately he wanted to destroy the Tower. He had goals now. A mission. The mixture of pain and rage was so intense he was shivering, threatening to explode, and he clamped down on those feelings with an iron grip.
It wasn’t enough. His hatred, that was.
That surprised Jack. A small thread of consciousness tried to ask why, but it was quickly shut down by the pain.
He was going to die. The pain was going to kill him. He desperately wanted it to stop. He wanted to die.
Jack laid there in disbelief as agony had its way with him, slowly murdering him from the inside out. He quit fighting against it, and let the pain devour him so thoroughly, he wasn’t even sure he had a body anymore. He couldn’t move anything, his body refusing to respond any longer to his commands.
For some reason, he couldn’t stop thinking about that dumb fucking goblin. Here he was in his death throes, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the first time he met Nutt: naked and clueless, about to be cooked by a bunch of pink orcs.
His thoughts turned to the Obsidian Storm Syndicate and the group of absolute weirdos he had gathered up.
Devin had become a friend, which was strange, seeing as how he didn’t like him very much at all on the first floor. He wondered if Sam was alright, and decided right then and there that he was going to haunt him in the afterlife for kicks and giggles.
He thought about Sarah. Not about her in the final moments in the Tower. He was too tired to be angry now, and all the hate in his heart just wasn’t cutting it for him. No. He thought about her in those quiet moments when it was just the two of them. Before the Tower. Before everything was so complicated and annoying.
He thought about Hannah, his first and best friend. He wanted to know what she got from the auction house. Probably something stupid.
Jack laid there, lost in the sea of pain, suddenly desperate for a life raft.
He didn’t want to die. He wanted to see his friends. He focused on that. His friends.
The swirling vortex inside of him slowly came to a crawl, then it stopped completely, a still, blue lake without even the ripples of wind. A perfect, empty circle floated deep inside of him.
He could feel the waters of that quiet lake. His hand fell to the ground with a splash.
Not water. Blood. His blood. So much blood…
“Hold on, you idiot!” a muffled voice called in the back of his mind.
“Idiot? Hannah? Why are you here?” he gasped.
His stomach went cold, and he started shivering.
“Drink this.” Someone tilted his head back and poured liquid down his throat. Immediately, his bones started vibrating. It felt good.
Jack felt his head slump forward. He caught glimpses of a small gnome. “Morty? Is that you?”
“That’s right, you fool. Come back to us.”
Jack’s vision was blurry, but he tried to raise his head back up, letting it hit the wall behind him. There was a massive block of ice behind him. He wondered why that was.
“Your little gambit turned Karlisle crazy. Had to turn him into a popsicle so he would cool off,” Mortimaxx said, glancing over his shoulder.
Jack just grinned at the gnome, his vision fading in and out.
“It worked,” he laughed, coughing up blood. “It worked…”
His vision went black.