The moment the meeting ended, Hephaestus and Mnemosyne got to work. Hephaestus had already received the updated schematics for the DR gear version 2.0 and the massive industrial atomic printers inside the Cube switched from what they were doing to printing hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of new DR gear. As most government officials used both glasses and pods, the printing and delivery would take a few days.But Mnemosyne’s job could immediately begin. She directed the individual librarians in the Akashic Library to begin doing immediate deep scans on the people they were monitoring. A full 80% of the government officials were immediately scanned, while the others would be scanned as they came on shift and began working. The civilian scans, however, would take some time; unless it was absolutely necessary, no orders would go out to interrupt people’s daily lives. Not only would it increase dissatisfaction and resentment among the populace, it might tip off the tar
In orbit above Avalon Island.Aron’s stealth shuttle had reached apogee and was about to descend. Its target: Shelton, Washington. He called up the reports by the operatives who had been assigned there and began reading them during the short trip.Jason Todd and Catherine O’Shaugnessy signaled that they had found a cult base a few months prior. Not just a cell, but a full-blown base. They hadn’t been able to infiltrate it, but they were positive that the entire gated community of Hartstene Pointe was a disguised cultist base. Once they had discovered that, they’d opted to lay low and continue their covers as Tim and Siobhan Roberts, fully immersing themselves in their respective roles.Months later, the call to go to ground had gone out, and the two had been living in their underground facility since. On the surface, they had gone to care for an ailing relative, even going so far as to hire one of their suspected cultists to housesit for them until their return. But instead, they had
Just a few streets away from the courthouse in Shelton was an irish pub. To tourists and locals, it was a gathering place for people to drink their worries away, eat “ethnic” cuisine, and, on St. Patrick’s Day, celebrate by gulping down cheap beer with even cheaper green dye added.But to the cult of the progenitor, it was a beginning. Its basement was where Rick had first begun preaching his ideal of a new utopia where the progenitors would live hand-in-hand with the human descendants they’d left behind when they left to explore the vast universe. It was a shrine, a place of pilgrimage, and the closest thing to a holy site that the cult had, and it was why not just one, but two of Rick’s inner circle were present in such a flea speck town that was only included on maps out of a sense of obligation.One of them was hidden, masquerading as the chief of police, and the other was the Hartstene Pointe Maintenance Association’s vice president.The phone on the police chief’s desk rang, but
An hour before the strike in Shelton.Aron walked through the hatch into the underground facility constructed by Jason and Catherine. He looked around in approval, thinking, ‘This is a good aesthetic, but it needs a little something... extra.’He gestured for his escort to halt, then bent down and, perhaps in a fit of chuunibyo, clapped his hands and placed them on the ground. Unseen by his unblessed escort, a runic circle spread out from his hands and the floor, walls, and ceiling began changing. Line after line dug itself through the imperial steel alloy structure, leaving behind a mystifying, maze-like pattern. The lines etched themselves throughout the entire base for an entire five minutes before the etching process was completed. Once they stopped, the runic circle under Aron’s hands began pulsing like a heartbeat, each pulse coming faster and faster as the process continued. Finally, the pulse was so fast it appeared that it was a solid light, then rune after rune flew out of
(Ed note: Trigger warning. Torture and gore.)The emperor’s aegis was the best of the best of Aegis, and well deserving of their title as the most elite special force under the ARES umbrella. Though their training focused primarily on defense, a wise man once said that the best defense was a good offense. Of course, nobody knew exactly who first said that, and sports coaches and military strategists around the world all laid claim to it coming from one of their forebears, but whoever said it was still an incredibly wise man.Thus, the emperor’s aegis was also unparalleled in all areas. They could perform counterintelligence operations with the grace of a nyxian, special military operations with the ease of a reaper, and were still the strongest shield standing between Aron and those who would wish to target him. So capturing a few terrified cultists was as easy to them as drinking water or snapping their fingers.Twenty minutes after they had captured the last fleeing cultists, they
Aron’s eyes flashed gold as he looked at the unconscious cultists in the crater. He noticed a purple worm wriggling its way out of the eye of one of the awakeners and attempting to flee. But since his shield blocked all mana from passing through in both directions, the purple worm could only bang against it like a fly on a windowpane.He stepped off the rim of the crater and slid down the steep side. “Why did everything disintegrate when I absorbed all of the mana?” he asked Nova.{Have you heard of the saying that all matter is mostly emptiness, sir?} she replied.“Refresh my memory.”{Atoms are over 99.9% empty space. If they were blown up to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a marble in the center, and the electrons would be microscopic specks of dust orbiting around the outside of the stadium in the parking lot. {So when mana is injected into matter, it fills that empty space up, like turning the entire stadium into a huge swimming pool, or perhaps
‘I wonder how skilled this guy is with his affinity,’ Aron thought as he broke past Mach eight. He was still tracking the little purple worm as he flew, even though it hadn’t stopped accelerating yet. ‘I can’t afford to be mind controlled. The empire can’t afford it....’Mind control was a truly problematic ability, one that Aron’s currently structured shield rune wouldn’t be able to fully protect him against until he took the time to adjust it and train with the new runic structure. Habit was both good and bad, and in the heat of battle, he really didn’t want to be using new runes that he hadn’t practiced with.The same could be said for the mind control tech that was on him, as there was a slight possibility that it would fail, and no matter how low the possibility is, it is not a good idea.Besides, he didn’t have time to modify it now regardless; the worm he was tracking was still speeding up.Everything would depend on whether or not the mana had taught Aron’s target. He certainl
Amarillo, Texas.In the Oakdale neighborhood of Amarillo was a shabby, dilapidated one-bedroom house. Its windows were boarded up and the outside was covered in graffiti, and the front lawn had overgrown with weeds until it spilled out over the curb and onto the street. Inside, a young man was sleeping on a pile of old U-Haul moving blankets.He opened his eyes, a purple glint flashing through them, and sat up. He pulled an old flip phone out of his pocket and called the imperial police agency’s non-emergency number, then reported that a homeless person was squatting in the house he was in, then sat back to wait for the police to arrive.A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. The young man opened the door and, as he had expected, two men in neat imperial police uniforms were standing on the porch.The taller of the two officers gave a friendly smile and said, “Hello, sir. I’m Officer St. Pierre, and this is my partner, Officer Mendoza. We received a report that someone he