EP.1 The Butterfly's Dream (4)
Ash was not the only one swept away by the energy pulse.
THOOM!
The golden concentric rings that had burst forth from Akina rolled clean over the altar, engulfing everything in their path. The broadcast drones flitting through the air dropped like birds with snapped wings, thudding lifelessly to the floor — and just like that, Ifrit's broadcast, which had been racing toward its climax, came to an abrupt end.
Not that anyone had the luxury of caring. The wave had caught Ifrit and ROA up in it just the same.
"Wha—!"
Ifrit's heart-shaped glow flickered furiously and went dark, while Dullahan staggered in place, his visor flashing [SYSTEM SHUTTING DOWN]. Jack O'Lantern clutched his pumpkin helmet as though a migraine were tearing through his skull.
Utterly defenseless, every one of them. The one mercy was that the Sentinel legion was in precisely the same state.
Like matching poles of a magnet forced together, the machines were hurled outward from the altar in unison. The sinister red glow of their optical sensors died, and there they lay, powered down and sprawled across the ground.
The battlefield — a cacophony of explosions, gunfire, screams, and electronic shrieking — sank into stillness. An untimely silence settled over the altar.
"Sohyeop···!"
Of them all, it was Ash who came to first.
Ignoring the guidance text blooming above his optical sensors, Ash dragged his steel body — sluggish and unresponsive, as though seized by cramp — toward Akina.
The girl stood rooted at the very center of the altar, exactly as before. Her gold-flooded eyes, and the hazy, unfocused gaze beneath them, were unchanged as well.
And she kept muttering something, over and over.
Strange — and strangely beautiful — was the fact that her murmuring carried two distinct voices, two different manners of speech coexisting as though two souls dwelt in her at once.
Yet they shared one thing in common. Both of them were searching for someone.
"..Mister? Where are you···?"
"Where is my escort warrior, where has my escort warrior gone!"
One was beyond understanding; the other he understood all too well. And so Ash spoke.
"Aye, Sohyeop. I am here. I am right here."
Akina did not recognize him. Or rather, she did not so much as glance at the humanoid drawing near — her golden eyes went on wandering the empty air.
"Ugh. My head."
It was then that Ifrit, having finally steadied herself, came over. She looked from the darkened Nexus Port to the girl standing vacant-eyed, and reached her conclusion quickly.
"Damn it, what the hell is even going on. The Deep Dive looks like it finished, but···." She let out a low sigh. "..She's clearly not right. Let's get out of here first."
Ash nodded. "I concur."
Stepping forward, Ash pulled the cable plugged into the back of Akina's neck. As though that had been a signal, the girl's slight frame slid limply downward — and Ash caught her with one arm.
The old, scrap-steel arm.
Akina nestled into it for a moment, then spoke.
"Mister···?"
"Aye. 'Tis I."
"Where were you?"
"Where would I have been? I was here the whole time."
Ash thought, suddenly, of the snipers. He was still weighing whether he ought to mention the brief absence it had taken to deal with them when Akina smiled faintly and pressed herself a little deeper into his chest.
"Thank goodness."
"..We mean to leave these ruins now. So hold fast to me. Let us go home."
"Home···." Akina looked up at him. "Then where does that leave my escort warrior?"
Before he could ask what on earth she meant, Jack O'Lantern's shout rang out across the silent altar.
"Oh, shit!" He gestured frantically toward the base of the altar. "Th-those things are getting back up!"
Every gaze turned downward. The Sentinel walkers were rising once more — their once-crimson optical sensors now dyed a solemn, magnificent gold. And somehow, that glow looked a great deal like Akina's gold-flooded eyes.
They gathered without a sound, yet with an orderliness so perfect it bordered on uncanny. Gone was the mad, random charging; gone, the strange babbling. They simply stood in stillness, staring at the intruders upon the altar — and that eerie quiet was somehow a far greater threat than any assault.
"..The air's gone thoroughly ill. Let's move. Now."
"Agreed."
Ifrit checked her remaining ammunition; Dullahan racked the charging handle and inspected the chamber. Jack, his bombs spent, drew a sidearm and thumbed off the safety. Ash tightened his grip on the girl in his arms.
"MOVE!"
Ifrit roared, and four pathfinders broke into a sprint. In the same instant, the silent sentinels moved.
"..Ah, shit···!"
They did not simply rush in. They formed ranks to wall off the corridor, and spread wide to encircle the group on every side. Like well-drilled soldiers, each unit performed its appointed task, tightening the noose.
"What the hell is with these bastards all of a sudden!"
Ifrit hammered the front line with rapid bursts of Dragon's Breath. The flaming buckshot hurled the foremost sentinels off their feet — and in the very next breath, another walker stepped into the gap. The same enemy as ever, yet twice as hard to fight.
"Make way, Yeohyeop! I shall cleave the path!"
Ash cradled Akina in his left arm and swung his blade with his right. The steel edge drove into the thinnest seam of the encirclement.
Swish!
He cut down the sentinel barring the way — and cut down the next. And then, abruptly, Ash noticed something strange.
The ring was closing with more tactical precision than before, blocking every route — and yet the 'attacks' themselves were passive. Not a single ranged shot. Even the ones closing in seemed consumed only with obstructing his path with their own bodies. As if they were buying time.
Rather than trying in earnest to kill them, it was a bizarre defensive posture that seemed bent on pinning them here at any cost.
'..It makes no difference.' Ash swung his steel blade. 'Whatever their intent!'
His purpose was one, and one only: to escape these ruins and reach Sanctum. To restore Akina's peace of mind. That alone mattered.
At some point, speed had entered Ash's blade — for through his Neuro-Art, his cerebral force was now circulating at full spin. He pierced a walker through the chest, sheared off an arm, hewed through legs. Wherever his sword passed, scrap metal and shattered parts came down like rain.
The flanks needed no looking after. Ifrit and ROA's two pathfinders were leveling their muzzles at everything that moved. They advanced as a single 'blade' — and at last, they broke through the sentinels' encirclement, escaping the vast chamber where the altar had stood.
"Speed up!"
At Ifrit's call, the whole party burst into a faster pace.
Their escape was anything but smooth. The sentinels were everywhere in the ruins. Even retracing their route back out, Sentinel walkers kept surfacing from who-knew-where, surging in wave after wave — uncannily, always pinpointing exactly where Ash and his companions were.
Their attacks remained as unthreatening as ever. It was their numbers that beggared imagination.
And so Team Elementary Girls' ammunition burned away at a frightening rate.
"Damn it, I'm nearly dry."
Ifrit's murmur echoed down the long, straight corridor. How much longer could they hold out? Anxiety had crept into her face. And yet she was not in complete despair — for Ash, whose sword was his true weapon, was still with them.
"Hey, Ash. Don't you need electricity this time?"
"Thy jest is a poor one."
Unlike before, his power reserves looked reasonably ample, and Ifrit drew what comfort from that she could.
How far had they run? At some point, they arrived at a cavern that felt terribly familiar — the very cavern where they had first crossed paths with Siren.
But one look at the state of it, and not one of them could find their voice.
Witchcraft was still there. Having originally barricaded the main passage to keep every other society out, it was, in a sense, only natural. But unlike before, their condition was wretched beyond words.
The cavern was choked with the corpses they had seen last time, along with the wreckage of sentinels the team had apparently fought. And among that wreckage lay Witchcraft's own — Nymph. She had been cut into dozens of pieces and scattered far and wide, past any hope of recognizing the body she'd had in her former life. The nails she had polished with such loving care now lay smeared with blood and muck, strewn about wherever they had fallen.
Lamia, too, was in a terrible state. She had kept her life, but one arm and both feet were gone, and she was dragging herself across the floor, face drenched in terror, desperately trying to get away from something.
And last of all — Siren.
She hung in the air, her neck seized in the grip of an unidentified Sentinel: a pale-gray-bodied machine that — a Sentinel, of all things — was dressed in a robe of aged silk.
"Siren!"
At the sight of Ash's party emerging between the cavern walls, the Sentinel slowly turned its head. Its single surviving golden optical sensor — half-destroyed, the only one left — swept across them all, then locked onto Akina in Ash's arms.
"Fi······nally···."
An old, ruined electronic voice. With that, the machine flung Siren bodily against the cavern wall.
"Kgh—!"
That split-second opening — Dullahan did not miss it. When he had finished aiming, no one could say; his gauss rifle spat a single streak of light with a thunderous crack. A hyper-velocity round no human's dynamic vision could ever hope to track, flying dead-true for the Sentinel's head.
And yet — unbelievably — the Sentinel drew the old single-edged sword at its waist and swung it. The motion was as supple as flowing water, and as fast as lightning besides.
KAANG!
The sharp ring of steel parting air. With nothing more than a slight tilt of its blade, the Sentinel brushed the round's trajectory aside as though wiping away dust.
Deflecting a bullet with a sword. It was movement that recalled, uncannily, the feats Ash himself had displayed.
Dullahan fired again in open disbelief — and the result was the same. Each time, the Sentinel twisted every trajectory with the barest turn of its blade.
But as though none of that were worth a moment's concern, the Sentinel turned its head back toward Akina and let its ruined voice rasp out once more.
"At······last······my······shrine······maiden's······descent···."
Before the words had finished falling, Ash drew the hem of his windcloak over Akina, hiding her from view — even as he met the Sentinel's gaze head-on.
"So it is you, then?"
A low electronic voice, and at the same time an unshakably resolute one, rolled through the cavern.
"The 'escort warrior' of whom Sohyeop speaks?"
Only then did the Sentinel's lone golden sensor settle on Ash. Two machine swordsmen looked upon one another.
In the space of an instant, countless fragments of information tore through Ash's main core.
Akina's incomprehensible muttering. The sentinels' sensors turning gold. The strange, passive defensive tactics. Escort warrior. The Sentinel before him now. Fragmentary pieces assembled themselves into a single meaning.
'Something drawn out of the Nexus is calling to the sentinels. No — "calling" is the wrong word. Something more tender than that... something more fundamental.'
The deduction chased its own tail onward. 'And yet something is off. The way they changed their bearing the moment Sohyeop's Deep Dive ended, as if they had only been waiting for it — and the way that unidentified Sentinel shows itself only now.'
Looking back on it, the inconsistencies were more than one or two. 'How did the nameless idol who claimed to be the first discoverer ever reach ruins this deep? No — come to think of it, her corpse was never seen either. The altar was pristine. Because a recovery team collected the bodies first? But then they would simply have attempted the Deep Dive the moment the collection finished — it was right there beside the altar.'
Abruptly, Ash's optical sensors flared with light.
'They were moved. Arranged so that human corpse-recovery crews would find them easily — and thereby, so that the existence of the Nexus Port would be proclaimed!'
That footage had been fabricated. For the sake of a single goal.
'But why? Were the sentinels not a defense system meant to guard the ruins — the Nexus Port above all? What purpose could possibly... wait. Purpose?'
Purpose. Had that not been the very word the Sentinel before him had just murmured?
At last, Ash grasped the whole of the truth. He spoke to the Sentinel.
"Might I put one question to you?"
The Sentinel — the escort warrior — did not answer. Taking silence for assent, Ash pressed on.
"Is all of this your design?"
"Design? What design, out of nowhere?"
It was Ifrit beside him who asked. Ash answered her without ever taking his eyes off the escort warrior.
"I mean that this entire expedition is a trap that Sentinel has laid. To lure pathfinders here — technomancers above all — to the Nexus Port."
"So the Sentinel was trying to bait in technomancers? What kind of nonsense is that? A defense system inviting its own attackers? There's no reason for it!"
"Nay. He has one."
Ash went on. "What slept within that Nexus Port. He intended to bring about the 'descent' of what he calls his 'shrine maiden' — by borrowing the body of a technomancer."
Even as he said it, Ash raised the blade he had been trailing low. "Am I wrong, escort warrior?"
The one-eyed escort warrior, who had been gazing at Ash all the while, lifted his own trailing single-edged sword — just as Ash did.
"..Thy······name···?"
"Ash. Ash Blade."
"A······sh. I······see. And I am···."
"There is no need."
Ash cut him off. "What use have I for the name of a man about to die? Remain as the escort warrior. That shall be easier to forget."
A cold provocation. The escort warrior's golden sensor flickered, faintly.
"Hn, hnh······well said······that is amusing···!"
In the meantime, Ash had placed Akina into Ifrit's keeping. "I entrust her to you."
Ifrit nodded without a word. With that, gripping his steel blade anew, Ash stepped into the cavern.
The techno-swordsman clad in a black goretex windcloak — and the Sentinel warrior draped in aged silk.
For a brief moment, the two locked gazes, each weighing the other.
And then, in the very same instant — without a shred of hesitation — they charged.