October 20th, 629
“ETA 10 minutes.”
I silently contemplated as the jet we were on got closer to our destination.
I could imagine how many pieces were moving right now, and like everyone else who would come to be embroiled in what was about to happen, I knew it was all just a matter of timing.
Well, one problem was, at least. I had prepared too thoroughly to be caught off guard by this event. I had every advantage and nothing that my enemies did could ruin me any more than how I already had been.
I glanced at a map of the Kingdom being projected in my vision. The entirety of Sector 4 was on the move, even the teams that had been rising with the main Iron Legion Brigades. They currently only had two tasks: sterilize Wonderland and conduct the Heist.
Every helicopter and plane that had been on standby was being used to this end. At the moment, only Sector 4 was looting all the vaults. As soon as the Pope got back to me with the information I wanted, I’d drop him the maps and Church forces would enter the fray as well.
Only after I had taken my pickings, of course. There was no way I was going to leave all of the most valuable material for the Church to take, not after what had happened. I couldn’t truly take all of it though. Although I was collecting most of it, I still had to pay Anderson.
Most of my debt to him was actually for Tana’s life all those years ago. The rest was for the help that he and Luna had given me since then, plus a little bonus that I was about to acquire from the Death Shrine.
Nobody could say that I didn’t pay what I owed. After this, the Order was going to acquire an obscene boost in strength. They would need it for the upcoming shitshow though, so I wasn’t complaining.
With a sigh, I sent the map away, focusing on that feeling in the distance.
I could begin to feel the Death Shrine, but this time, I was no longer being driven insane by its influence. Good thing too. I may have had an aneurysm with how high my blood pressure already was.
With another thought, I glanced at Ironheart, the Sovereign looking back at me.
“Thanks for helping me.”
“No need to mind it. I can already feel what’s happening, though its a little unbelievable. Your soldiers get captured just once and the entire world looks like its falling apart.”
“The power of exposed secrets. I’m sure I’ll be making headlines soon. After this though, you and Talexia need to discuss things. I’ve got a helicopter coming for you that’ll take you to her estate. Whatever plans you guys had, it’s about time to start acting on them.”
“Hmm…”
He gave me a thoughtful look, the pilot giving the 3 minute alert.
“I suppose I should’ve known we couldn’t hide things from you.”
“Extremely few can. Either way, it’s a good thing for you guys that things are happening this way. I just hope you don’t squander this.”
“Don’t worry, Cooper. We may not be as smart as you but we have strengths of our own. Still, believe me when I say that I didn’t want to see things go this way either.”
I didn’t respond to that. I’m sure he felt some heartache at all of this given how long he had fought with Iron Legion, but that’s all it was. He wasn’t the one losing everything he had built.
I held back another sigh, nodding.
“I’ll be entrusting this fight to you. They’ve got two Authority Eleven combatants, one Broodfather, and one King Blood of Despair, plus the honorable mention of the Shrine itself. We need to kill then all as fast as possible so we can save our boys. They’re currently going through torture unimaginable to the human mind. I don’t want them staying that way for a second longer.”
“I understand. Nevertheless, that’s some valuable material. I’ll keep it intact for you.”
“Only if it doesn’t take too much more effort.”
“I’m a Sovereign, Cooper, one with two Sovereign kills to his name. I’ll be able to handle a King Blood for you.”
I just nodded, muttering my thanks as the green light came.
We all stood up as the hatch dropped. Then, I stepped to the side and motioned, Ironheart stepping forward and tossing himself out.
The rest of us gave it several seconds before doing the same, seeing the ground already near. The plane had done a low flyover, only a few thousand feet up instead of 20 thousand.
Charon displayed metrics in my vision while descending, and I could see the devastation that Ironheart started to wreak. His Vigor and Aura covered the entire facility, tore all the camouflaging and buildings to shreds, killed every living signature, and then punched a huge hole in the ground.
The tangible aura of sadism spilled forth from the underground dungeon, and then, the entire room was filled with Sovereign power. I suppose it was wrong of me to doubt the man. He was, indeed, a Sovereign.
We landed not long after, all of us running over to the hole in the ground. Umara and I jumped down it, a few others following while those that didn’t went to secure the area.
My feet touched down inside the dungeon, and there I saw it. The Death Shrine stood talk with bodies hooked into its branches. Unlike the last time I had fought one though, the guardian was now dead, the opening to that mass of brain and neural fluid completely exposed.
My eyes flicked around, finding the dead Broodfather and King Blood nearby. True to his word, both of them were dead and both of them didn’t have but a single scratch on them.
The technique surprised me, so I asked.
“How did you kill them?”
“Attach your Concept to your Aura and use Vigor as the medium. You can strike at their soul instead of their body. It destroys their consciousness, but those techniques are usually much weaker than physical or magical ones. It either takes overwhelming power to pull it off, or a Concept especially suited to it. I have the latter.”
“I see.”
I supposed it made sense. Ironheart’s Concept, as well as his Auric technique, followed the principles of Nothingness and the Void. It seemed, on top of everything else, he had tricks like these up his sleeves.
I looked up at the soldiers on the tree, and with a command, Ironheart cut them down at the branches. Umara caught them before they hit the floor, lowering them down as their screams and cries of agony continued.
I went over to them, spreading my Psyka through their bodies. The torture had stopped, but at this point, the Shrine had basically programmed pain into their neurons. They were torturing themselves, and without a complete rewrite of their brains, it wouldn’t stop.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have that kind of knowledge or power. I could certainly attempt such a thing, but that would take experiments and time. All that would accomplish was making them live in terror and pain for that much longer. Not to mention that I wasn’t even sure if they had any more of themselves in there. Their memories had been scoured, and once no longer useful, their very existence had been turned into pain.
Truly, the Death Shrine was an entity designed and grown to be the icon of sadism itself. It had only been a few hours and my soldiers had been reduced to husks.
Except for one, however.
With a quick decision, I put all but one out of their misery, their screams dying out, leaving only one.
I turned to Colonel Graves, nothing but a torso and head, his limbs nowhere to be see. Although he was screaming just like the others, I could feel the resistance within him. His brain had been slowly rewritten, but with enough willpower, the man had slowed it enough to give him more time.
He was still in there, which meant I had pull him back out of the hell he had been put in.
I let out a long breath. There was a chance that in the end, I was only going to make him suffer more. But I had a feeling he wanted me to take the chance, just in case I succeeded.
His thoughts were basically laid bare before me, the branches sticking out of his body turned into conduits for Psykic power and neural stimulation. I didn’t even need to interface with them to feel his calls for his Commmander, to see the desperation and slight hope he carried.
Any longer and he too would’ve been snuffed out. But we had gotten here fast enough.
I was going to try.
“Alright Umara, time to put those healing skills to work.”
“You’re gonna have to lead. I’m a little out of my depth here.”
“Already on it. We’ll start at the fringes. I need to get used to this before we move to the skull.”
“Same.”
We both got comfortable over his body, the others all standing guard.
My armored hand moved over his body, the exosuit acting as a conduit for my power. My Aura then bloomed, sinking into the very atmosphere and flooding Graves’ body.
I made a direct line from his neurons to mine, and through them, I almost directly felt his pain. The only reason I didn’t was because of the filters and protections in my Mind Palace. Nevertheless, it gave me enough direct information to start understanding how the Death Shrine’s Psykic power was affecting his body.
And from there, I started.
My new Quantum Psionics started to energize the atmosphere with intelligence. Massive arrays sprung up to life around me before being deconstructed and twisted around as I collected more information.
I blocked out all sense of time, wholly devoting my mind toward collecting, dissecting, and developing my Quantum Psionics around the phenomena within Graves’ body.
It seemed that as close as I had gotten to the Great Barrier, I still had a ways to go. I had already started to feel out the Conceptual, and through it I found out that all intelligence systems both carried inherent Psyka and interacted with it. Understand it on a deep enough level, and I could pick up on those interactions, indirectly reading the intelligence of another person.
That could be mere locomotive transmissions going to the limbs in a fight, or it could be their thoughts and memories. Everything was stored somewhere, and everything could be pulled to the surface one way or another.
The Death Shrine was a machine built to do just that. It was the best at this, and for the first time, I was allowed to learn from it.
I picked up on the subtleties of how the Death Shrines power interacted with Grave’s nerves, how the Psyka stimulated them and yet carried intention. The power to directly stimulate certain neurons and neural clusters was the dominant function here. At that point, it was just a matter of rewriting through conditioning. The adaptation of the human brain turned into a weakness in this situation. In its attempt to cope with what was happening to it, the brain would rewrite itself around whatever was stimulating it in order to suppress or ignore it. But as the stimulations grew, so too did the degree of rewriting.
The Death Shrine took this to the extreme, inducing a rewrite of the entire fleshly body for a singular purpose: causing quite literally the most amount of pain a human could possibly experience.
That was just the first step though. The second came through the branches. I hadn’t been able to see it before on the Island of Continuance, but now I knew that those metal blades acted as wires that interfaced with the nervous system. As they grew through the body, the neural capacity of the victim also grew with it, and therefore, added more ways to feel pain. It was parasitic in how it integrated itself, only becoming enough of a part of the human body to carry out its function. The rest was left in control of the Shrine, the controller that delivered the pain.
Finally, there was the last function. In an attempt to be even more sadistic than anybody could think was possible, the Shrine had the power to carry illusions through its branches and into the minds of its victims, putting them into a mental word where the Shrine was god. It was a simulation of hell itself and also the primary method through which they extracted memories, utilizing the inherent Psyka within every part of the body and nervous system.
What I needed to do was separate what remained of the Death Shrine from Graves’ body and then kill off any residual parasitic ties that it made. After that, I had to eliminate the Psykic powers pervading his mind, which in a way would require me to interact with his memories and remove what was foreign.
Both physical and mental surgeries would have to take place in tandem, so I overlaid visual indicators on Graves’ body to help guide Umara and keep her in my flow.
My voice echoed in her mind as we started. We began at the base of the spine, Umara moving her mana through the bone and flesh and wrapping it around the metal spikes that had been driven through. Chunk by chunk she carved them out, and as she did so I severed the neural links those spikes had made, guarding the spinal cord as I did so.
Umara’s mana poured out to heal the damage left behind, sealing holes, regrowing bones, and sustaining his body. She popped some nutrient potion into his mouth, which would help with providing his body the fuel it needed to work under her healing.
The process was slow though. With just one bone removed, both of us were able to pick up on the inhibiting influence of the Shrine. I had to be especially careful, trying not to leave behind fragments of the Shrine while also making sure I didn’t hurt the man’s nerves more than I had to, lest I risk paralyzing him, especially around the spinal cord. Umara could heal a lot, but we still had plenty to get through. I couldn’t have her waste too much mana before we got to the brain.
With one vertebrae done, we moved to the next. The spikes had been lodged into and between each one, all the way up the spine. Then they grew through Graves’ body, through his organs, along major nerves, and curled around muscles. Nobody that was ever mounted on a Death Shrine was supposed to come down from it. It was supposed to be a permanent coffin.
It just about was, too. I knew that even with the healing we were giving, Graves wouldn’t come out of this the same. I wasn’t sure what would come of him, but that hardly mattered.
Umara’s magic wrapped around another spike, breaking it before it could slice through another major nerve before carefully taking out the fragments. While she did that, I isolated the nerves with my Quantum Psionics, which had gradually started to flood the man’s body.
Quantum Psionics were rather amazing. They were adaptable, effective, and most importantly, efficient. Despite that, it was taking a massive amount of Psyka out of me. I had never expended so much since I advanced, but constantly changing the programming so that it could handle any new evils the Shrine left behind was taxing.
I was counting every second as we worked, and by the time two hours had passed, Graves’ entire nervous system was under my control. I was plucking the memories and stimulations associated with the spikes and branches that Umara was pulling out. I had to align what I was calling my Psychosurgery with hers, the two ends of the spectrum inextricably linked. After all, I now knew that physical changes in things like neurons could ellicit changes in magical phenomenon like Psyka. It was borderline Conceptual. It was groundbreaking information that I would add to my Quantum Psionics to further refine their capabilities and open new avenues of applications.
I was finally learning about how the most evil entity to ever be designed was able to work, and I was actively developing countermeasures.
My entire body was surrounded with my work, dense arrays above Graves controlling blades made of active intelligence to prod and slice his metaphysical body.
I smiled in concentration, Umara and I entering our rhythm and maintaining. Despite the situation, I found this work quite enjoyable. It had been a long time since I’d pushed myself like this. I had been on the battlefield for too long, the researcher within me being neglected.
Well, after this, I’d be making up for all that.
Hour by hour passed. By the fourth hour we had risen up the spine, and at that point, I also noticed that I received some data from the Pope. It only took a quick glance to see that he had made true on our deal. I didn’t have time to read it, but I decided to trust him since I was busy, releasing authorization to activate any and all teleporters they wanted to extract from.
By the fifth hour, after distractions were taken care of, we had completed the spine. The sixth hour saw us removing everything from Graves’ organs and tissues, which was easier than working around sensitive nerves. Some parts Umara simply cut out and regrew, saving us time and energy.
The man had stopped screaming at some point, only twitching if we accidentally stimulated something that was better left dormant.
The seventh hour finally saw us at his skull. While the Death Shrine had been delicate around the brain, like everything else, its work was intended to be permanent. After Umara opened a slot in his skull and made an avenue for extracting the branches, we started to work on it.
The branches wrapped around the brain and subty prodded deep inside of it. Unfortunately, those parts seemed to have fused, and unlike the other parts of the body, I didn’t want to start cutting out chunks of what was now Graves’ brain. That left one other option.
I could leave the branches inside, and simply render their influence inert. I would kill their programming, Umara would dull them so they didn’t cause any damage, and then I would replace their functions so that they’d integrate better with the neurons around them. They would become a permanent feature of Graves’ brain, for better or worse. While not ideal, it was better than accidentally lobotomizing him.
We acted on that option. It actually ended up being easier than the other parts. While we had to be careful, we weren’t removing anything except the superficial branches so his brain didn’t get compressed in his skull. Anything near the brain itself was left untouched, and with some more delicate applications, Umara was able to dull whatever had sunk deep inside the wrinkles of his intelligence. Magic was convenient like that.
Once that was done, Umara closed him up and let me finish. I used the absolute influence over his nervous system that I developed to target the remnants in the brain and neutralize them. Then I rewrote them, allowing them to accommodate the higher functions of neural clusters and connections. Ironically while used for evil purposes, the Death Shrine as a material seemed to be perfect for interfacing with the body and mind. When I raised concerns about rejection, Umara said there was none.
With that, our work was finally done. I stared down at Graves, sweat beading on my forehead while the MONARCH used its active cooling to bring my body temp down. Umara nearly collapsed in exhaustion and stress once I gave her a thumbs up, all the arrays around me shutting down and dispersing.
Then, I saw Graves’ eyes open.
He looked at me, then tried to move and failing when he realized he still had no limbs.
“Calm down, Graves. It’s me, John Cooper. You’re no longer in the hell they put you through.”
He didn’t respond, simply staring back. I could almost see his neural code being rewritten once more. I had taken out anything that had been designed by the Death Shrine. He shouldn’t be feeling too much pain, though I could never be sure if he was completely rid of its effects. The man had resisted for a long time, but the damage had still been done.
Eventually though, he got his words out.
“...Commander… You’ve brought me back from the dead.”
“Not quite, but good enough. You don’t have any limbs right now, but we can try and get them healed. Heh, either that or we can give you prosthetics. I’m sure I could develop some.”
“...I like that idea, Commander. If it will make me strong enough never to be captured like that again, then I will do anything. I wish to be strong enough to guard your secrets, as I’ve failed to do today.”
I watched him, saw his resolve and a hint of the same desperation I had seen while he was screaming. It seemed that, just as strongly as the Death Shrine had overwritten him to feel pain, so too did his willpower overwrite his body to resist.
All for the sake of his duty. He believed in his Commander and the work of Iron Legion with every fiber of his being. It was why I selected him for Sector 4, and he had paid for it.
“Don’t blame yourself, Colonel. By my order, you were the one in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s nobody’s fault but mine. For now, we will extract you and send you someplace you can recover. You will need time to adjust yourself, and I need to handle the fallout of what’s just happened.”
“...Did my memories expose us, Commander?”
“They did, but I suppose on some level I always knew it was going to happen. Not like this, but I knew. Let me worry about the fallout though. You’ve just gone through the worst experience that could ever be fathomed and came out conscious. Colonel Graves, you’ve served the Legion with the highest possible level of tenacity and strength. I owe you more than I could give, so for now, just rest. I will find you later to pay some of my debt.”
“...Understood Commander. I will remain on standby.”
“Good. Now lets get out of this hellhole.”
We all made our way out, exposed to daylight once again, now laced with the air of dusk. As the sun got lower, I could feel the world churning.
We had spent a lot of time here. The Church was already on the move, looting everything they possibly could while nobles across the Kingdom were scrambling to stop them. My maps were screaming with alerts and sensors being tripped, nearly all of the teleporters having been activated.
Wonderland was also continuing to sterilize everything. Everything that hadn’t been uploaded to the Nodenet was being pushed while everything that already had an online copy was being burned. Then there were the experiments, gadgets, and devices that had to be moved, all of them being chucked into planes to be transported to the Island of continuance. There were at least two dozen planes in the sky and more being rolled onto the runway.
I had to go help though. If my guesses were right, I’d be needed in Wonderland. The Royal Family would be acting on us, no doubt about that. I just had to wait and see exactly what they’d do, then respond appropriately.
I didn’t have long either, because according to a sudden message from the Key Master, the entire Royal Guard was on the move, along with some local militias from various nobles nearby to the Whetted City.
It didn’t take a genius to guess they were all aimed at Wonderland.