Tlara and Willow were still hugging, and Daniel swore he could make out actual tears coming from the Beastmaster. He supposed that was fair. Note to self, cut Tlara some slack until we get her looked at. He briefly wondered if now was a good time to reveal that he’d made her a set of armor for when she got revived, but that did not look like something he should interrupt.

  Instead, he turned his attention to his phone. Despite the very attractive option of exploring the guts of an ancient precursor to the Octyrurm, he quickly tapped through his maps first. He’d kept the heightened version running since the reset by the entrance. Technically, they could have just used this to keep oriented while traversing through the living spaces, but he’d wanted a backup just in case. Also, Khare seemed to enjoy painting duty.

  What he saw broadly confirmed what he suspected. Taking over the rift had revealed a circular area over half a kilometer across, which made up a decent portion of the ruin’s width. It seemed contained to one level, and was mostly made up of a tangle of hallways and rooms with the transport tunnel making a river between two sides. There were regular hallways leading up to it, though they extended into the sides of the walls so that if you were just walking along the section bordering the tunnel, you wouldn’t run into them.

  There were also central places that wider corridors fed into, usually either straight from the transport tunnel entrance or within one turn of them. The area he revealed even covered where he thought the first rift they’d seen was, which went to show how far they hadn’t gone while walking through the living quarters. They couldn’t get all the way back to where they’d originally entered the ruins by just following the revealed area, and there was enough variation that he didn’t trust himself to guide them back from what they already knew, but they could try and cleanse another astral rift closer to there to reveal the rest of what they needed.

  With that settled, he turned his attention to the new Arcadian app. Considering it had effectively stolen the next power he would have gotten, he was sure it should be worth the-

  God damnit. Daniel only saw two options when he clicked into the app. One was a record of all notifications that the Arcadian had sent him, though everything from the Octyrrum was missing. That was nice, sure, but it certainly didn’t beat a charge attack that could blow up islands. The second option was just weird.

  When the Arcadian had labeled the room ‘Lectorum A4’ he’d realized he’d misunderstood what it was for. Sure, it was shaped oddly like a sports arena from his home, but the rows of benches could hold just as many students as they could fans. The goalposts, and why the rift was in the center of them, was a bit of a mystery, though one the Arcadian app could help solve.

  The only thing that had come up when he selected the option for this room was a control panel that had options such as ‘local power’, ‘display’, ‘lighting’, and ‘security’ among other things. Local power was currently off, and everything else was disabled. It seemed kind of obvious what he had to do.

  Arcadian Administrative Alert

  >Routing power to Lectorum A4.

  >Processing…

  >Warning! Arcadian power supply critical. Main generator offline.

  >Action successful.

  Lights flicked on across the hall, making their torches mostly meaningless. The station’s warning indicator of an approaching car had shown Daniel that the ruins had light sources that weren’t immediately obvious when powered off, and this room was no exception. Floodlights appeared above, bathing them in sterile, white light. Blue lit up the grayish stone of the benches as well, somehow projecting a tangible backing judging by how Tlara was pushed into a sitting position when the one on hers appeared from below.

  Hardlight, Daniel thought while trying to act like he hadn’t just done that. I know this world’s got some tech, but this is beyond what the Divine Pavilion had. At least as far as I’ve remembered so far.

  “Wow,” Khiat said over his thoughts, looking around at what had become a well lit auditorium. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Figures you’d like this,” Shuni retorted. “We might as well be kilometers underground. Flying here feels wrong. What is this place, anyway?”

  “Some kind of lecture hall,” Daniel explained, switching over to display. “As far as the ruins as a whole, I’m not sure. Probably some kind of city since they have public transportation.” He frowned as an error popped up when moving to the next screen.

  Arcadian Administrative Alert

  >Lectorum A4 knowledge banks unrecoverable.

  “Looks like whatever information they had here’s gone though.”

  “No kidding,” Shuni said dryly, glancing around at the otherwise empty room.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be that obvious. They had some way of storing information in the room itself. Based on what I’m seeing, I think the four pillars in this room are projectors. They’d throw up images in the air for everyone sitting down to watch.” He was half-guessing here, but not without good reason. Even though the files had been lost, he could still activate or retract the projectors. The second option would probably sink them into the floor, making the central space more open. “Uh, sorry about that Willow,” he called over tentatively to where she had started looking at the seats while Tlara continued to huddle into herself. “I’m testing stuff out. There might be another light source pop up but I’ll try not to disturb you guys. Let us know if you need anything.”

  Activating the projectors made ringed light flare up at multiple points along the goalposts, and as he suspected, a screen appeared between each of them. The resolution wasn’t the same considering the lectorum’s shape and the projector’s positioning to match that, but it seemed not to matter as the long side just copied the image and placed the two side by side. Another set of options unlocked, with ‘presenter mode’ being a default choice.

  Suddenly Khare, who had been resting on top of the rift, fell over. This coincided with six illusory versions of them appearing to the side of each displayed image. From the inside of the rectangle, Daniel could see through the screens, but not what was on them. “You ok?” he asked.

  The gestalt, who had somehow managed to trip while in their Chimeric Form, replied, “Many.” It almost sounded like the gestalt had a headache, or whatever the closest approximation was to that. They didn’t appear to be in extreme pain, and Daniel couldn’t miss how the dopple-Khare’s disappeared when the Martialist dragged themself off the platform. A bit warily, he stepped on.

  Daniel had some experience with discorporeal sensation, his attempts at tolerating Hunter’s senses chief among them. In that case, it had been inhabiting another body with overtuned senses. This was something else. It was like Daniel was staring at a wall of security monitors, only he was the wall. Eight different visual inputs were being fed to him: his own, what was on the screen, as well as six different shots of the lectorum. He didn’t feel like he was in seven different places, sight was the only sense duplicated, but he still quickly stepped off and disabled presenter mode before shaking his head. Guess you got to get used to that.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  While he and Khare had investigated the new options at the rift, Sigron had gone to lie fully across a set of benches while still in armor. Khiat and Shuni, meanwhile, were looking at what the screens were displaying from the other side. He’d seen it himself in presenter mode, but the image had been distorted, glitched, and he hadn’t been able to focus on it. Whatever it was had sparked a conversation between them.

  “-but it’s nothing this complex. Honestly I think it’s a weird hobby, but you get people like that when someone rich enough doesn’t get a class. All that coin has to go somewhere.” Shuni had a hand up on the side of her face contemplatively while the other crossed against her chest to hold her other arm, the Rogue looking up at an image Daniel couldn’t see from this side of the screen.

  Khiat, still covered by her furred armor, was fully extended in height as the center of the lectorum more than accommodated her. “They don’t use real ones do they?”

  “Crest no. At least, not ours.” Shuni feigned spitting on the floor at the thought of whatever it was Khiat had proposed. “That would be too out there. Wonder why a bunch of humans were looking at something like this of all things.”

  “It could be that these ruins weren’t built before the Collapse,” Khiat offered as Daniel passed through what turned out to be a fully intangible screen.

  “Nah.” Shuni turned her head up to look at the solid ceiling. “No avianoid built this place.”

  “What are you talking about?” Daniel asked, having missed the initial topic while getting his head nearly split open.

  “Egg painting,” Shuni replied dispassionately.

  “Egg painti- what the fuck!?” Daniel stumbled backward while turning around, startling the two. Khiat reached out a hand to catch him but he recovered through Balance first, the power allowing him to keep his footing in most low pressure scenarios. While there were no enemies, what was displayed on the screens of the lectorum pushed this up to at least a moderate pressure one, though he stayed standing regardless.

  “You alright?”

  “That’s…” On second thought, if these ruins had been abandoned during a Collapse, the presentation he’d salvaged shouldn’t have been that surprising, but there was a personal connection to the image that evoked strong memories. It was, of course, the egg form of the monster gods, complete with the mana-weaved shield around them.

  He frowned as he saw the title on the slide. It was a bit distorted, and some of the characters were missing, but his mind was still able to process it as ‘Aberrant System Nexus - Stage 1’. “You thought this was about egg painting?” he asked the two in a bit of a strained voice. While the label was a bit arcane to those who didn’t know what he did, it still carried the same gravitas as a graphic displaying war casualties.

  “I saw a painted egg, not like I can read the ancient crap on that illusion. Why, can you?”

  Daniel looked a little closer at the script. His ability to comprehend other languages, including what Shuni had just told him, relied on him not paying too close attention to what was written or said. He still couldn’t separate spoken words from the English he heard, and it was possible he never could, but writing was different. Now that she said it, it did appear to be a different language.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so.” He sighed, taking another look at his phone and confirming that the rest of whatever was here was lost. Not that he could do anything about it if one of the monster gods came at him, but he was curious about what the fully developed ones looked like. Clearly the last slide set had been intended to brief the ‘qualified users’ of the ‘Arcadian’ about the encroaching monster system on their world.

  Khiat walked up next to him and peered closely at the top of the image, which came out to just above her maximum height. “What does it say?”

  “Hang on, I’ll read the rest of it. It’s pretty serious,” he added for Shuni’s benefit. Sigron’s helmet also picked up from across the room but the Knight made no other move. Turning his attention back to the display, Daniel noted that there were three additional points of information surrounding the central graphic of the egg. There was some distortion to these as well leading to parts of the translation getting clipped. Summarizing,

  >The outward barrier is practically impenetrable to all mortal-grade magics regardless of attunement or specialty. No weapon has been found that can pierce the defense of a wounded ASN.

  >Divination and other means of locating a nested ASN is impossible while in stage 1, except for certain recorded manifestations of the fundament of Karma.

  >The massive mana required to sustain the barrier of a stage 1 ASN is typically provided through communion with qualified equivalents among the feral species. Research is ongoing to determine the viability of co-opting this method for use on captured specimens.

  On the whole it didn’t tell him much, other than explaining a bit about why the forces of the Octyrrum had missed the monster god sleeping in the Thormundz. Or, for that matter, why they hadn’t sniffed out all of them and just skipped those regions while taking over the rest of the world. The last point was interesting, though. He knew from Rorshawd that communion was essentially a mortal giving a god their soul to use as a resource.

  How exactly the monsters had first invaded the Octyrrum was unclear to him, though he could see these eggs landing like meteors. They could have brought along enough followers to sustain the shields long enough to complete their evolution to the next stage, only for the Collapse to force them back into their protected state. What conflicted with known fact was how this shield was sustained during Collapses.

  Simply put, the monster gods shouldn’t have had any followers to perform communions. If that wasn’t where the mana was coming from, where was it?

  Oh crap, Daniel thought as Shuni and Khiat grew more impatient for his explanation. Process of elimination had led him to a thought that had triggered something he hadn’t felt in some time. Here, in the middle of hostile ruins and with a clock still on them, he’d found a memory resonance strong enough to peel back more of what he’d lost. They needed to get out of here, but he couldn’t let these chances pass, especially with Torch’s sketchy unidentification growing firmer per his last encounter with Cloak.

  “I’m going to need an hour.”

  “To, uh, translate?” Shuni asked, confused. “I don’t know if we have that kind of time.”

  Daniel made a quick decision, moving back to his map screen. “We’ll have to make it. Here’s a local map of the ruins, the rift gave it to me when I took it over. And here’s where we came in. I think if we get to this circular clearing, we can find a rift that’ll show us what we need to get back.”

  “Ok?”

  “Khare has a storage power we can put people into. I’ll meditate in there, you get us to that rift. Khare can pull me out if you need me, but only if you need me. Wait outside the rift wherever’s safe if you get there first.”

  Shuni backed up a step, holding up her hands. “Hold up, why am I doing this?”

  “You’ll have to take point in case there are crawlers around, which means you’ll be leading everybody.” Daniel looked over to the avianoid sisters and sighed. “Give them some time if they need it, but I need to start this now. I’ll explain everything later.”

  “Spoke stuff?” Shuni asked in a resigned way.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fine.”

  Daniel fast walked over to where Khare was, disabling and retracting the projectors as he did so. He briefly flipped to security to see if he could lock down the room after they left, saw one option in particular he’d expected to have shown up at some point, and enabled it.

  Arcadian Administrative Alert

  >Teleportation gate at Lectorum A4 has been activated. Further power consumption noted at the local node.

  >Processing…

  >Warning! Arcadian power supply critical. Rainbow drive inoperable, main power core offline.

  >Action successful.

  >Warning!: General alert in effect. Only qualified users are allowed access to the Arcadian’s teleportation network.

  >Warning!: Astral corruption has rendered multiple nodes inactive in the Arcadian teleportation network. Current nodes active: 1

  He flicked a quick Moment of Clarity to read, but slowing time didn’t help the decay of what he was feeling. That was centered more on the anchoring of a concept to the hidden memories, something Torch’s effect was trying to patch out once the flaw had been noticed. “Khare, there’s no time to explain. Can you carry me like when we were smuggling me into Aughal? I’ll need you to give me air, though, don’t close off the space.”

  “Moving?” Khare dissociated into their pure gestalt form, which was easier to enter without vines compacting to mimic human muscle and tissue.

  “Yeah. I’ll be meditating. It’s like trying to advance, and it’s important. Don’t wake me up unless we get into a fight you need me for. Shuni knows where to go, just follow her.” It was a lot to dump on the language-challenged gestalt, but they were bonded.

  “Rogue,” Khare affirmed, and Daniel had to trust his friend had gotten the gist. The feeling was fading, definitely faster than the previous times he’d hit a strong point of deja vu.

  I wish I could have talked to Willow before this, Daniel thought as he tried not to think about how he hadn’t fully gotten over his claustrophobia. I’m not trying to seem like a jerk, but I need these memories if I’m ever going to find out what happened to Hunter’s body.

  Settling down, he was barely able to grasp onto the sensation before it fully slipped away, and his mind moved back to the past.