The World Beyond the Gate
Levia had revealed her capabilities with almost startling speed, but still — better late than never. Clinging to that scrap of optimism, we pushed straight through the planetary fortress's surveillance net under the ancient warship's magnificent cloaking field.
At last we slipped free of that lukewarm star system and began the search in earnest.
"Judging by the nano-machines' signal architecture, the ones emitting a slightly stronger pulse appear to serve as signal relays."
"Hmm."
"Which means following the signal is the same as hopping from relay to relay… until we finally reach the source itself."
The problem was that the signal in question was so vanishingly faint that neither Levia nor anyone else aboard could actually track it.
God! Why! Did You birth us and then refuse to make the signal strong enough!
I was about to drown in a fresh wave of irritation when—
"Oh my. So we simply need to follow the signal by intensity, is that it?"
"You can actually see it, Minister Vermouth?"
Minister Vermouth — who until moments ago had been treated as little more than dead weight — had somehow devised a method for tracking the signal. The atmosphere inside the Leviathan, which until then had been ruled by a quiet "whatever happens, happens" fatalism, shifted at once.
"If we take this route, we should arrive even faster…?"
With an estimated arrival time far sooner than anyone had expected, a fragile current of hope began to circulate through the ship.
Even so, the situation facing me and everyone else aboard the Leviathan had not fundamentally changed.
"Honestly, every time we pass one of these planets I just want to drop an orbital bombardment on it, you know?"
"…I feel the same."
Riel had a point. Every time a fresh nano-machine fleet boiled up from the planets we passed after clearing the gatekeepers, the urge to score a clean, cloaked ambush kill grew stronger in everyone.
But—
"With the exception of the 'planetary fortresses' we first encountered, every single planet in this space functions as a central processing unit for the nano-machines."
"…"
"If we attack a planet while cloaked, the nano-machines will ignore their own losses and blanket the entire sector where they estimate our ship to be with wide-area fire until we are erased."
Levia's blunt correction left no room for argument. And then, with impeccable timing—
[PAUSED]
Event: The Truth of the Grey Nightmare
Amazingly, these ancient nightmare machines were receiving separate communications and orders from planets elsewhere in the galaxy — planets themselves packed full of identical nano-machines — and conducting their operations accordingly.
But those planets, in turn, were little more than additional command-processing nodes as far as the nano-machines were concerned.
The event message that popped up at that exact moment only drove the point home: do that, and we all die. So I kept reining everyone in and simply pressed quietly onward.
We had been underway for quite some time when Riel, apparently sensing something off, tilted her head toward Levia, who stood quietly at my side.
"Hey, Levia."
"What is it, Aide?"
"Ever since we crossed into this space, something's been bugging me. What's with that weird radio wave I keep picking up from the ordinary planets — not the fortified ones?"
What weird radio wave?
I had never felt anything of the sort, yet Riel was describing it to Levia as if it were obvious. Without meaning to, I found myself leaning in to listen.
And just as Levia opened her mouth to answer—
[PAUSED]
Event: Things That Breed Nightmares
Not long after entering the nano-machine-infested expanse of space, you discovered a startling fact.
With the exception of planets whose mantles had been remodeled into fortresses, any world that still retained a relatively ordinary shape was continuously radiating a profoundly twisted radio wave — no, a waveform — into the surrounding void.
Choice 1:Fascinating. Let's investigate! (Random event triggers; linked event proceeds)
Choice 2:No time for this. We'll deal with the details after everything is finished. (Linked event proceeds)
No sense of timing whatsoever.
It was as if the system had decided that whatever Riel and Levia were about to discuss would be a spoiler for me. The event message made it clear that the answer to Riel's question was about to drop.
Do I stop and look into it properly… or just keep going?
The whole thing reeked of the system trying to pad out event content, but I nodded to myself all the same and naturally selected Choice 1.
Choice 1: Fascinating. Let's investigate! (Random event triggers; linked event proceeds)
Honestly, whatever it was, I found it genuinely interesting.
> [PAUSE LIFTED]
With the choice made and the pause released, I waited for whatever was about to come out of Levia's mouth.
A moment later…
"…The radio wave — no, the waveform — emanating from those planets has the effect of inducing every manner of hallucination and auditory phantom in any living being exposed to it."
Whoa.
For reasons I couldn't explain, the nano-machine planets of this world — unlike the ones I remembered from the game — were apparently broadcasting a Dementia-style effect at living creatures, like some kind of ReMarker.
…But if that's the case, why are we all fine?
A few people from the Ministry of Technology and Science had certainly been acting bizarrely around the nano-machines, but that felt less like Dementia and more like them simply failing to rein in their own innate madness. Beyond that, no one had reported any symptoms, and I found myself quietly puzzled.
Riel seemed to share the thought. She tilted her head and pressed Levia further.
"Something feels off, though. I haven't seen anyone — myself included — suffering from hallucinations or anything like that."
"The researchers, however…"
"Ah, those people are like that normally, so they don't count as a valid sample."
The assessment was so merciless that even Levia's trademark poker face seemed to crack, just a little, before she continued.
"That is because the cloaking field this vessel deploys — a spacetime-distortion field — completely blocks the waveform."
"Heeh."
I didn't know that either.
Hearing Levia's explanation, I finally understood why the event messages had been so insistent that only this ship could enter the region at all.
Without that spacetime-distortion field, a normal vessel's first priority wouldn't even be surviving the nanobot assault — it would be not self-destructing from the inside out.
In other words, without this Dark Age warship, deployment itself would have been impossible. I felt a quiet surge of relief that my choice had been the right one, and let out a silent sigh.
I almost turned a 4X grand strategy sim into a slaughter-action game.
I offered a silent prayer of thanks once more to my small, precious Leviathan for sparing us that nightmare.
On we went, past planet after planet of damned nano-machine mass…
"Disgustingly large."
"Mm."
…and past planetary fortresses bristling with anti-aircraft batteries bigger than most battleships, until at last—
"Minister Arto. The next star system is the one where we first encountered Count Ash."
"Mm."
We had reached the threshold of what was, for all practical purposes, the final sector of this space.
Of course, this was not the moment to fall back or start acting like a hero party preparing for a raid.
The Demon King's castle is right in front of us — hurry up and distribute the potions!
There was neither time nor reason for any of that.
"Entering hyperspace jump. Three… two… one… Warp in."
Ready or not, the Leviathan drove straight into the final star system.
And the first thing that greeted our eyes as we dropped out of the hyperspace lane was—
At last, you stand face to face with the architect of the plan to drown the entire galaxy in nano-machines…
No — not the architect. The architect-star.
It was not the ordinary nano-machine-coated planetary form I remembered from the game.
What waited for us was something that resembled the nano-machines' "planetary fortresses" — and yet went so much further into pure, unhinged excess that the word "brain-dead" almost felt too kind.