A Record of the Past
"Damn it, damn it, damn it—! How the hell did those things get in here? We installed jamming equipment, for god's sake..."
"If you've got time to flap your lips, help with the assembly! The AI's been hijacked, so now everything has to be done by hand!"
"We're finished! It's over!"
"Shut your mouth! We just have to hold out until the response teams get here! There's no way the Federation would write off a facility this size!"
People in white lab coats, or in nothing more remarkable than everyday clothes, hurried back and forth across the cavernous research lab. It had clearly been a long time since any of them had washed, and sweat ran in rivulets down the faces of men and women alike; a few had clearly been wounded, their arms or legs wrapped in bloodstained bandages. Yet no one treated such trifling injuries as worth mentioning — they simply raised their voices at one another and got on with their own tasks.
"Why did you bring laser weapons down here?"
"We don't exactly have a surplus of anything else. This was never a military installation to begin with."
"Damn it, and it's industrial-grade at that. Well, I suppose live rounds weren't all that effective against them anyway."
The survivors had split into two groups. One was throwing up a barricade near the section of floor where the hidden stairway — the same stairs we had come up through — lay concealed, rifles trained on the spot. Judging by their bearing, these were your typical engineers and scientists, not soldiers, and their shooting stances left a great deal to be desired. But the atmosphere around them was deadly serious in a way that words couldn't capture.
Like raw recruits about to see combat for the very first time.
Grrrrraaaaak—! Keerik, keerik!
The other group had taken up tools of their own and swarmed over the bipedal combat robot we'd seen earlier like ants at a picnic. Apparently enough time had passed that the giant machine's exoskeleton was already nearly complete. Welders ran seams to mount additional weapons and external armor, while others hammered away at laptops tethered to the robot, fine-tuning its posture-control routines and the like.
The tension hanging over the room was little different from the middle of an actual battlefield.
THOOM! THOOM! THOOM!
About a minute had gone by when a thunderous pounding erupted from the floor concealing the only passage to Sublevel 3. The whole surface shuddered as if it might cave in at any moment, and the people holding guns on it bellowed toward the assembly team.
"It's coming up!!! Is it finished yet??"
"Already?! Ten seconds — just give me ten seconds!"
"Ten seconds? Easy for you to say!"
CRACK!
CRUNCH-CRACK-CRACK!
Barely had the word ten seconds left his mouth when the heaving floor finally gave way, tearing open a small hole — barely wide enough to squeeze a single child through. And up out of that little hole burst a green, hideously ugly monster!
Drrrrrrrrk—!
Whiiiiine—!
The riflemen squeezed their triggers almost instantly. Live rounds fired at near machine-gun rates and beams of colored laser light wove a web of fire that crashed down over the monster clawing its way into the room. The sheer firepower kicked up a gale of displaced air that whipped wildly through the defenders' hair.
PABABABABAK!
"Cease fire!"
Worried, it seemed, about the damage to the floor, they held their fire soon enough. And in the spot where that staggering volume of ordnance had landed...
"Graaargh...!"
...there remained a single [Goblin], shrieking and wailing with both of its arms blown clean off. Look at it from any angle — it was a goblin exactly like the ones from the research levels. Not a Goblin Warrior, not a shaman, not a Chief... just an ordinary goblin.
How could a mere goblin hold its body together under firepower like that?
Even a Goblin Chief, if it took a barrage on that scale, should have vanished without leaving so much as a shred of meat behind.
It seemed the people on the screen shared my opinion, because they shrieked in disbelief and started cursing.
"Filthy little bastards... they take a hit like that and that's all the damage they show for it?"
"More coming! Two of them... no, THREE!!"
The armless goblin collapsed where it stood. But from the hole already punched through the floor, several more shapes came boiling up into the light!
"Fire!"
Drrrrrrrk!
KWA-BOOM!
This time the defenders even broke out something resembling a prepared claymore charge. And yet, astonishingly, even that much firepower failed to stop every goblin. The monsters charged in a single file, each one volunteering as a kind of meat shield, so that the goblin at the end of the line arrived at the barricade without a scratch on it.
Shrrk!
The survivor drew a long blade-aura from the tiny sword in its hand — an aura blade, of all things. The hastily thrown-together barricade was never going to hold against that.
What followed was a massacre.
Hwoong! Shrrk!
"Please, spare— khekh!"
"Mommy!"
A single goblin darted through the crowd like a wolf loose among a flock of lambs, cutting down everything in its path. One light thrust of an aura-wreathed blade was enough to punch a small, neat hole through an ordinary person and drop them dead. A few tried shooting back, but most of the bullets did little more than scuff the creature's green hide before tumbling uselessly across the floor.
KWAJIK!
Cleverly, the goblin seemed to understand exactly what a gun was, because it put more effort into destroying the weapons than the people holding them. Within moments of tearing through the barricade, it had succeeded in slicing every last firearm out of human hands.
And with that, humanity's side had lost even the one countermeasure they'd had. Worse, the footage from the camera covering the hole in the floor showed it steadily widening, goblin after goblin climbing up out of the dark.
"Maintenance team!!"
"Done!!! We're moving out!"
THOOM, THOOM, THOOM!
KREEK!
At last, the bipedal war machine one group had been assembling was apparently finished. A robot with heavy axes mounted on all four of its arms came thundering across the room and brought one down on the rampaging goblin. The creature belatedly sensed the threat and raised its aura-shrouded blade.
KAANG!
KWADEUK!
The axe shattered the aura in a single stroke and cleaved the goblin clean in half behind it. A rather hollow end, for a monster that had shrugged off bullets.
The newly emerged goblins wielded aura blades of their own and tried to stand against the machine, glowing swords raised—
KWAJIK! KWAJIK!
"Kueeeck!"
—but the robot displayed a mystifying mastery of the axe, chopping every goblin that barred its way into pieces. To be fair, the goblins fought viciously to the end, clawing and slashing with their auras even as they died, but the thick armor took nothing worse than a few scratches.
Then the robot simply marched forward and shoved the goblins bodily into the hole itself. Wailing pitiably, the creatures tumbled back down into the dark. The humans cheered at the sight.
"That's what I'm talking about! Dozens of Meister-grade engineers built that thing — goblins are nothing to it!"
"Hey! No time to celebrate! We have to seal that entrance!"
"Move it, move it!"
SPLASH!
A burly, muscular man scrambled over with a bucket of milky white liquid and dumped the whole thing into the neatly drilled hole. The liquid, seemingly possessed of tremendous viscosity, refused to run down into the depths — instead it clung to the rim and sealed the breach completely. It hardened solid within seconds; even as goblins below pounded on the plug, it didn't budge so much as a hair.
"It's Rapid Nano Restoration Agent! I remembered we had some left over from last year, so I tore through the storage closets until I found it."
"Nice work! Although... doesn't that stuff degrade after about a week?"
"If it holds for a week, that's plenty."
"Fair enough."
The people muttered among themselves in low voices, a measure of calm returning. Someone counting out the remaining food stores, someone else treating the wounded and hunting for missing medicine, a third group debating the assembly of another robot — their voices were tinged with gloom, but they were the voices of people who had not yet given up hope.
However.
Shhhhhk... shhhhkkk...
A thin layer of frost began to spread, unbidden, across the laboratory ceiling. Far too deliberate a phenomenon to pass for anything natural. But the survivors had no leisure to stand around admiring the ceiling, and their blood was still hot from the battle — so they noticed far, far too late.
Only when their breath began to fog white did one of them voice the question.
"What the...? Why is it so cold in here?"
"...Did the climate control break? No — even if it did, we're underground. It might get warm down here, but never cold. Ventilation... huh? The ceiling..."
"We're fucked! It's a [Specter]! Ghost-type phantasm!!"
"Activate the psychon defense barriers!"
"It doesn't spool up that fast—"
Eeheeheehee...!
The humans scrambled, suddenly understanding — but it was already too late. Pale gray figures were sliding down out of the ceiling. They looked as if a human shape had been replicated to maybe eighty percent accuracy; every feature was in its proper place, and that was precisely what made them so deeply, unnervingly wrong. The creatures hauled their mouth corners upward into grins no human skeleton could sustain, and loosed keening, mournful wails.
There were only three of them...
"So this is where it ends."
"Hahaha..."
"Airi... at last, I'll get to see you again..."
Unlike against the goblins, the people each reacted in their own way before closing their eyes in resignation — as if they understood that this death, at least, would be the less painful kind.
Hihihihihi...!!
Shhhhk... shhhkkk...
As if savoring the warmth of living human bodies, the Specters drifted toward the crowd trailing that revolting laughter, closing the distance in the space of a breath. Without a single act of violence, they simply passed through the humans' bodies. And with that one simple act... the people were doomed to die, frozen pale and stiff.
The sturdy combat robot lashed out in what looked like a final, futile struggle, swinging its axe at a Specter gliding through the air. The blade cut true, slicing cleanly through the thing's body.
Ahaha...
But the Specters paid the robot's attacks no more mind than a passing breeze, and the slaughter went on. Less than thirty seconds later, the laboratory that had once seethed with dozens of human beings was silent except for the hum of a machine standing in their midst.
The Specters conducted a meticulous final sweep, confirming every kill down to the last, then rose back up through the ceiling and were gone. The robot — no brain, no pilot — simply stood there, vacant, until its power ran dry.
The video ended.
Lena and I stood there for a moment, a little dazed, like people walking out of an uncomfortably realistic gore film.
"Something incredible happened there, huh... I can't believe guns developed to the point where they shoot lasers."
"That was my first time seeing a directed-energy weapon too. But honestly, that's the least of the strange things in that footage."
"A goblin swinging a mana weapon like blade-aura is definitely weird, right, Mister? I've never even heard of goblins like that, let alone seen one..."
And beyond that, their resistance to firearms had been absurd. Never mind shrugging off live rounds — they'd tanked laser weapons. And yet that very same durability had been neutralized by an ordinary(?) axe swing...? None of it added up. It wasn't as if they carried game-style damage resistance against ranged attacks.
"There is, in fact, a highly probable explanation."
"Ranged-attack resistance?"
"Upon detailed analysis of the footage, live rounds suffer an extreme deceleration in the final instant before contacting the goblins' skin, while directed-energy beams scatter entirely."
Noah manipulated the display, zooming in on the moment a goblin took a bullet. We studied the footage, slowed down dozens of times over — and sure enough, it was exactly as she said.
Which was, if anything, even more preposterous.
"Oh, come on. This isn't some mass-produced hunter flick. Can a skill that convenient even exist? How would [ranged] even be defined?"
"For a goblin capable of wielding blade-aura, it would be well within the realm of possibility."
"That part bugs me too, though. For something that uses blade-aura, its movements are way too clumsy. It's like..."
"Like strength was forcibly grafted onto it. That is the impression as well."
"Exactly that."
The goblins had massacred those people, true — but only thanks to the aura blades and the ranged-attack resistance. In terms of raw physical ability, they'd been barely a cut above ordinary monsters. Wasn't that precisely why a single robot with four axes had cleaned out the lot of them? If these had been true warriors who'd earned their blade-aura through years of grueling training, they would never have died so helplessly.
"And those Specter things. There were monsters like that out there? Ghost-type ones?"
"There is an entry in the codex, though relegated to a footnote. They are stated to be immune to physical attacks but vulnerable to strikes infused with mana. There is no cause for concern, Mister."
"Hmm... well, that's a relief, I suppose. But still — goblins resistant to ranged attacks, and Specters that are immune to physical damage and utterly unbothered by walls... it's all too on-the-nose."
"On-the-nose in what way, Mister?"
Lena tilted her head, genuinely baffled. To her, monsters had always simply existed — a constant of the world — so perhaps nothing about them ever struck her as strange. But for someone like me, for whom a landscape without monsters felt more natural...
"No matter how I look at it, they were made to hard-counter the Ancients. Deliberately, I mean."
...that was the only conclusion I could reach.
Granted, the idea of any monster arising naturally was laughable in itself. But the creatures in this footage positively reeked of malice — of something engineered specifically to counter the weaponry humanity had spent centuries developing. Whatever the future civilization had been, its weapons would inevitably have evolved toward superiority at range. And even granting, a hundred times over, that monsters were a naturally occurring species, no living species would carry some grotesque trait like ranged-attack resistance. Setting aside whether such a thing was even possible... monsters were unmistakably the product of someone's malice.
So who, in the world, could it have been?