Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Griffin Tucker Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 4

Mount Discovery, Province of Aragonia

Kismet immediately flew up next to him, examining the door. Griffin turned and faced the rest of the room, not sure what he could do beyond shout. He had a few sticks of dynamite in his Inventory but he now had no illusions about his chances of survival if he lit one and threw it at any monster. They were only to be used in dire emergencies.

The noise from the zombies was getting louder, more insistent. “Hang on, the noise is getting louder?” Griffin muttered. “Should I drop the other barrel?”

“Better do it,” Kismet said, “I’m pretty sure this is a tensa-infused lock but the circuit is a few rituals I’m not entirely familiar with. I need to do some research so any extra time you can manufacture would be helpful.” She hadn’t turned to him but was still studying the door and the wall nearby intently.

“Uh, right,” Griffin said. He hadn’t been aware that he’d been talking out loud. “I’ll do that now.” He concentrated and a moment later, he located and dissolved the anchor point holding the brain barrel over the second hole he’d made.

Almost the same moment he did that, another room-shaking moan arose from the zombies. Griffin’s eyes widened. His SONAR was picking up half a dozen zombies from further back in the storage area sprinting in his direction. So far as he could tell, the zombies weren’t heading directly for him but it’s not like he was hidden; they’d sense him as soon as they got close enough. Hopefully, the scent of brains in the air was too much for them to resist and they’d pass him by.

Another plasma beam blasted into the floor from the Mother at the hole in the ceiling and Griffin winced. One of the zombies had been bisected by the plasma and had given Griffin a first-person view of what that beam would do to him if he forgot about the Mother for even a moment. He watched as the other zombies got close, then, one by one, ignored him in favor of the fresh brain scent.

“I think the zombies are distracted for the moment,” Griffin said. A winced as the Mother slammed its head into the hole in the ceiling. “But I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get out of here now. Not with that thing in the way.”

“We’ll worry about that afterward,” Kismet said. “I found the spot in the wall you need to gouge out.” She pointed out a spot about a meter away from the door that looked utterly indistinguishable from any other spot on the wall.

“Gouge…out?” Griffin said hesitantly. “Okay, I guess I can make a sledgehammer.”

Kismet nodded and looked over Griffin’s shoulder. “Good, hurry up. Once you expose the enchantment, you’ll need to insert your anima to the spot I show you and use your Overcharge ability to shove as much tensa as you can into it.”

Griffin cocked an eyebrow. “I haven’t used Overcharge much at all. Does it do what it says on the box?”

Kismet popped up the System entry for his racial ability in his HUD rather than answering him aloud.

Overcharge - Human Racial Gift

Description: You may manipulate tensa more directly than most. You can overcharge grafts and Class powers and infuse tensa into items to produce more potent effects by spending more tensa. You may spend up to 200% of the graft's activation cost to overcharge the graft or power.

Passive: Tensa throughput is increased by 25%.

“Okay, clear enough, though I don’t know about that whole tensa throughput thing. I get that it’s not important right now, but let’s put a pin in that,” Griffin remarked. “Cuz it’s hammer time!”

“Hurry,” Kismet replied.

Griffin considered replying with some kind of smart-ass remark or quip but then the zombie hoard moaned again. The noise was so loud it felt like his bones were vibrating in his flesh. He decided that he’d better just hurry and leave the commentary to later. He concentrated for a moment, pouring tensa into his Adaptive Conjuration. A moment later, a sledgehammer appeared in his hands, surprising him a little with its weight. He hefted it and took a stance.

He expected to break through the wall on the first swing but of course, he barely even made a dent in it. Griffin frowned and tried again, really winding up this time. He slammed the hammer into the wall and was rewarded with a tiny chip.

“Go faster!” Kismet called to him.

Griffin set his jaw and started going nuts on the wall, hitting it as hard as he could as fast as he could. With his Attributes, this was much faster and much harder. His grip remained firm despite the repeated slams into the wall. In just a few seconds, he had managed to chip away a grapefruit-sized chunk of wall and he paused for a moment, wiping away a trickle of sweat from his forehead and checking his progress.

There was a hint of silver amidst the plaster of the wall and Griffin knelt to inspect it. “Hey Kismet, is that it? Is that what I need to put my tensa into?”

“Yes,” Kismet said after a glance. “But you’ll need to expose a little more to get a good connection. You’ll need to physically touch that silver wire.”

“Great, I get to touch the magic exposed wire!” Griffin enthused sarcastically. “Maybe I’ll be able to get magic-electrocuted!”

“You’ll get magically torn apart by a horde of zombies—or incinerated by the Mother’s plasma beam—if you keep taking time to make jokes,” Kismet said.

Griffin sighed and hefted the sledgehammer again. He nodded once, glancing around to make sure there were no nearby zombies. The Mother kept slamming its head into the hole in the ceiling causing more mortar and plaster to come raining down from the ceiling. Griffin turned his back on the sight and got back to work. Now his hands felt slippery and his muscles were beginning to burn but he kept up his hammer blows into the wall.

When he finally stopped again, he’d been going for another long couple of minutes. This time, there was a platter-sized divot in the wall and a short, pencil-sized section of the silver wire had been exposed. Griffin tossed the sledgehammer aside and tentatively touched the exposed wire, expecting a severe shock. When he touched it though, nothing happened and he let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.

Duh, it wasn’t going to zap you, he thought. There’s barely any juice left in these enchantments.

Griffin then shoved as much tensa as he could into the exposed wire through his fingertips. The effect was underwhelming. There was a small pop and then a trickle of smoke rose out of the wire on the wall. Griffin straightened up and looked over at Kismet. She nodded and he rushed over to the door, yanking the door handle and nearly falling over as it swung right open.

He dashed inside, making sure to close the door carefully and quietly so as not to attract any more attention. Once safely inside, he breathed a sigh of relief that was slightly undermined by the muffled screech of a pissed-off plasma cybercentipede Mother.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Kismet reminded him. “The Mother’s plasma would melt through that door in a fraction of a second and it wouldn’t last much longer against the zombies if they knew you were in here.”

Griffin took the warning seriously and looked around. The room he found himself in now was small compared to the huge warehouse full of zombie storage cells and cramped with equipment. The recording he had seen where Kismet had identified the shard had been at a rather steep angle and hadn’t shown the rest of the room, so Griffin had been very curious to see what it would look like. Now that he was standing in there, it reminded him of a creepy HVAC room for a big office building.

The room was crowded with large, esoteric hunks of metal and tubing combined with odd blinking lights all cordoned off by narrow walkways. Griffin hurried down the nearest walkway between machines, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of something familiar. Kismet flashed in front of him and waved for him to follow her. Feeling a quick stab of relief that he wouldn’t have to navigate it alone, Griffin followed Kismet as fast as he could.

She led him through a few twists and turns, but it didn’t take long before a familiar-looking machine greeted Griffin: the one he’d seen in the video Kismet had shown him. In person, it was even more intimidating. It stood about two and a half meters tall and resembled a teched-out refrigerator. Dials, gauges, and screens showing various incomprehensible readouts were arranged all over the massive thing. There was a bulky-looking Systablo bolted to an armature that could be swung back and forth which Griffin took to be controls of some kind. He took the whole thing in at a glance and frowned. There was no obvious ethershard sticking out of it anywhere. He glanced over at Kismet, who didn’t seem too concerned.

“Okay, so where is it?” Griffin asked. “C’mon, Kismet, I’m not in the mood for dramatic reveals. I thought it was supposed to be, like, right here?” He held his hands out in front of him as if to present the little area and its complete lack of ethershards.

Kismet flew over to the Systablo on the armature and waved him over. “It’s unpowered, so you’ll need to supply a tensa source—which you’ll be able to do thanks to your DEMI Port—and then we’ll see what kind of security access your Great House Seal will grant us in a Vasilias-run weapons research facility.”

Griffin followed the System Eidolon over to the hulking machine a little nervously. “So the shard’s in there?” He nodded up to the machine.

“Yes, that’s what the records indicate.”

Griffin squared his shoulders and went over to the armature, pulling it up to his height. He closed his eyes, concentrating on his anima. Most of the time he could switch anima configurations without thinking about it, but he only had the chance to use his DEMI Port rarely and the odd little hook he had to form with his anima could be a bit fiddly. He took longer than strictly necessary, but he didn’t want to get it wrong just because he was terrified that zombies would break down the door at any moment and tear him apart. Once he had his anima properly shaped to hook into the device, he opened his eyes.

He hooked his anima into the Systablo and let a trickle of tensa into it through the connection. Nothing happened at first, but Griffin didn’t rush it. He gradually increased the tensa throughput, carefully feeling how his anima responded over the connection. A few seconds later, the screen on the Systablo flashed and turned on, showing the vortex and ten golden stars crest of House Vasilias that Griffin was beginning to become very familiar with.

The screen cleared and then a brief authentication challenge flashed on it. Griffin didn’t even have time to blink before the authentication challenge disappeared and the Systablo lit up with its main UI. There was a long list of programs with names that Griffin couldn’t understand. Kismet took over at that point. She was able to interact with the Systablo through Griffin’s DEMI port and as soon as she connected to it, screens started flashing faster than Griffin could follow.

After a few seconds, she said, “This is a diagnostics and control kiosk for this device. Hang on a moment as I figure out where the shard is…” She trailed off and more text and images flashed briefly on the screen as she navigated at speed through the menus and programs.

To Griffin, each second passed like an hour. The moans of the zombies outside the door were getting louder and Griffin had been steadily trying his best to ignore the arrhythmic thumping from the ceiling outside. He hoped that whatever this shard had would be more useful against the zombies than Reality Twine… Griffin smacked himself in the face with one hand. He had completely ignored one very obvious facet of its utility.

“You got this Kismet, I gotta go take care of something!” Griffin yelled over his shoulder, not waiting for a response as he dashed back through the twisting corridors to the door out to the zombie storage warehouse.

The moans of the zombies sounded like they were coming from right on the other side of the door and Griffin felt his stomach drop as he heard a thump from the door. Soon after, another, louder thump shuddered the door in its frame and Griffin hurried over, opening up his Inventory to make sure he still had the spool of Reality Twine he’d made for his plan.

Inventory

[Common] quality cybernetic parts 23.8 kg

[Junk] quality cybernetic parts 150 kg

[Rare] quality plasma cybercentipede meat 107 kg

Carpet 5.397 sq m

Cinnamon Rolls x 34

Dish x 44

Duffel Bag

Egg Drop Soup x 4

Egg rolls (dubious) x 3

Fork x 38

Glass x 90

Granite 537 kg

Knife

Monopoly Board Game (different versions) x 8

Notebook

Orange Juice 38 liters

Paper airplane x 331

Pen

Pillow x 4

Pizza x 12

Racquetball x 82

Reality Twine Spool 83 m

Soap (bar)

Spoon x 21

toothbrush

Towel x 59

Rolling his eyes at his mostly useless Inventory, Griffin scanned down the list quickly and found the Reality Twine. He pulled the spool out of his Inventory, grasping it in one hand as it appeared. It resembled a spool of fishing line, but infinitely stronger. He anchored as many pieces of Reality Twine as he could over the door, crisscrossing it with the indestructible Twine until his spool was empty and he’d placed more than a hundred new anchors to keep the whole mess in place.

Griffin stepped back and inspected his work. Even though Reality Twine was almost invisible normally, there was a noticeable distortion in the doorway, even if it was subtle. Still, Griffin didn’t think any zombies would be getting through that anytime soon. He dusted his hands, feeling satisfied, and jogged back over to Kismet.

As soon as he got back, Kismet turned to him and said, “Just in time! The programs here are…well, let’s just put it this way: the less said about them, the better.” She scowled at the Systablo and then seemed to collect herself. “You need to put your hand on the screen now. Direct physical contact from a Great House Seal is required to get the shard.”

Griffin did as she asked and then jumped back in startlement as the huge machine hissed releasing steam at seams all around it. Then two doors swung ponderously out, opening in the middle, revealing what was stored inside the machine. Nestled in padding and connected by dozens of wires and tubes was a futuristic-looking suit of powered armor with a full-face cover helmet that had an array of small camera lenses instead of a visor. It was slate grey and Griffin couldn’t tell what kind of material the armor plating was made out of. It looked intimidating as all hell, but he couldn’t find any ethershard anywhere.

“Wow,” he said, giving the word all the weight it deserved. He paused a beat then said, “So where’s the shard?”

“The suit is the shard,” Kismet said. “We need to collapse it.”

Griffin cocked a skeptical eyebrow at her and snorted through his nose with a chuckle, “Sure, lemme get right on that. ‘The suit is the shard’, come on, gimme a break. What kind of woo-ey bullshit explanation is that?”

Kismet flew over to him and mimed knocking his head with her holographic fist. Of course, Griffin felt nothing (except the sting of her disappointment of course) but he acted like it hurt anyway, rubbing at the spot.

“What’d you do that for?” He asked with elaborately offended dignity. “And more to the point, how do you suggest we ‘collapse’ it?”

The zombie groans and banging from the door further in the room had become constant, but he didn’t worry about that right now. The zombies—even the Mother—couldn’t get past his Reality Twine and that’s all that mattered to Griffin. That assumed the Twine was unbreakable like the description on the graft said and not just poetic license. Griffin reflected that the real tragedy of dying due to creative hyperbole would be that neither the Mother nor the zombies would appreciate the irony of it.

“We use the control kiosk, Griffin. Of course,” she said. “You’ll need to feed more tensa into it in just a moment. I’m going to open up the armor’s charging port so get ready to transfer.”

Griffin shrugged and nodded hooking his anima into the configuration his DEMI Port required. A moment later, Kismet manipulated the controls and a little port popped open on the right heel of the armor’s boot—or would this be considered a greave? Griffin wasn’t sure. It didn’t look like medieval knight’s armor. It looked more like it belonged on the set of a movie about space marines and alien bugs. With a feeling of trepidation, he hooked his anima into the port that had opened and began feeding tensa into it.

He had to transfer nearly half his tensa pool into the armor—a full ten kilosparks of tensa—before Kismet told him he’d provided enough to facilitate the collapse. Griffin nodded and pulled his anima from the port making sure to reconfigure it into his gathering technique to refill his tensa pool. Kismet, meanwhile, continued manipulating the controls with lightning speed. It still took her a couple of minutes of navigating menus and entering different values in interminable configuration files before she finally executed the process that would allow the suit of armor to collapse into an ethershard.

When the collapse finally happened, it happened suddenly; Griffin had expected something a bit more gradual. Instead, the armor folded in on itself in complex origami getting smaller and smaller until it was a Transformers-esque ethershard-shaped wedge of armor. Once the armor had stopped folding in on itself, it pulsed with a blindingly bright white light and when Griffin could look at it again, the shard looked like a deep, navy blue crystal with silver and jade lattices etched on the inside of it.

The shard floated there in midair, shimmering slightly in the dim light. Griffin grinned: it looked just like a treasure you’d get from a video game, floating there in front of its magically opened case. He reached out and plucked it from the air, holding it carefully with both hands. Still, he nearly dropped it when he heard another crash come from the door, this one much louder than any of the others before it.