Spear of Destiny James Baldwin (free romance novels .TXT) 📖

it. “Uhh… I dunno. I can’t see it properly, but it gives me the creeps.”

There were some etched plates on the tanks that looked like nameplates or identifiers written in Ancient Mau, but when I focused my HUD on them, it only bought up a paragraph of gibberish. Frowning, I mentally called the Screenshot Capture and took some pictures of the tank and the nameplate. I was about to send them to Rin to see if she could translate them, when my eyes snagged on something in the photo attachment thumbnails. I opened them, and felt my adrenaline start to tick up again.

The tank and the nameplate were both blacked out: a deep, sucking, vantablack-like darkness, from which no light entered or escaped. It was like they’d been snipped out of the screenshot. Without intending to, I searched the blackness for some kind of afterimage—and a dull throbbing pain shot through my head, chest, and left shoulder.

“Ach!” I winced, and closed the photo. “This place is fucked up, Karalti.”

“Yeahhh...” Karalti’s shoulders hunched. “Maybe we should go look over there?”

She pointed to the other end of the room. Past the tanks was a large steel table, pitted and rusted with age, and other devices that were so run down and crumbled as to be unrecognizable. Clay pots and other debris lay scattered. At the back of the room was something that reminded me of a primitive computer. It had a crank handle and various dials.

“I wonder if this was some kind of information storage?” I went to the terminal, trying to see if I could figure it out. My HUD came up with a blank tooltip when I tried to identify it. Highlighting the crank brought up an actual message. [This device cannot be repaired.]

“Huh.” I turned back. “Well, I don’t know what the fuck is going on in here, but I’m now sure this place wasn’t just a Chorus Vault. I think they had an entire military base here. They were researching these things.”

“That’d make sense,” Karalti replied, circling back around the tanks. “… Are these Drachan? Or parts of Drachan?”

“No idea. Whatever they are, I’m going to vote we don’t fuck with them right now.” I left the machine and went over to join her.

“We should take a sample with us if we can,” Karalti said. “We might be able to learn things from it.”

“Or it gets loose, possesses Cutthroat, and turns her into an Elder God or something.” I shuddered. “How about we see if we can fish something out of the console over there? We can’t repair it, but it might have something inside.”

“Sure.” Karalti looked over to it. “How do we get it open?”

I went over, searched the front of it, and found a patch of brittle black rust. I took a step back and drove my foot into it with a shout. Three solid front kicks and the panel caved in, revealing the guts of the machine.

“Let’s see…” I knelt down and let my eyes adjust. The guts of it were rotted, the stale air inside bitter with the smell of decayed mana. But as I scanned it, my HUD highlighted a small rack of dusty crystal plates: [Kyanine Tablets].

“Kyanine?” I carefully pulled them out. The semi-translucent crystal tablets were delicate, but still intact after thousands of years. “No idea what that is.”

“Let’s take them to Rin, and see what she says.” Karalti wiggled, looking back anxiously toward the open door. “I dunno about you, but I really want to get out of this room.”

“Same.” I folded them into my inventory. “Let’s get out of here.”

The next room we stickybeaked into was a wreck: there was nothing useful or scannable in there. As we exited, Suri, Rin and Gar emerged from the other end of the round hall. Suri waved to us.

“Find anything?” I called.

“Bunch of interesting little artifacts!” Suri hollered back, her voice rebounding off the walls. “Can you help us set up a zipline? Neither me or Gar here are gonna be able to bounce over those platforms to reach the Warsinger’s silo door.”

We had climbing gear that Rin had made us for our last trip down into a Chorus Vault. With Jump and some ingenuity, we were able to set up a line across the chamber, bypassing the crumbling remains of the floor and the water beneath. One by one, our friends were able to cross. Karalti and I caught them at the end of the line, helped them down, and pulled the swing back to the next passenger. We left the zipline in case we had to cross back.

“I hope the whole damn ocean isn’t waiting for us behind those doors.” Gar swaggered over to the titanic doors, craning his head to look up along the seam down the middle. “See that water? Wanna bet how much these doors are holding back?”

He pointed to a thin trickle of sea water running out from around the seal.

“Better brace for a flood, then.” I rolled my shoulders and made a beeline for it. Like the Dragon Gates, this door opened with the Spear. It was not the blood-bound locks we’d seen in Withering Rose’s much younger Chorus Vault. “Alright: everyone to the side. Hang onto something if you can. And get ready for a fight.”

I set the blade into the door lock and twisted. A resonant CLUNK echoed through the chamber before the doors began to very slowly open into the walls. Gears squealed and ancient, salt-rusted springs crackled as the doors ground back just enough to let a person squeeze through. A slop of polluted water gushed from the darkened room, along with a familiar bitter almond and burned plastic reek mixed with the odor of old blood. The air that puffed out was bitterly cold.

“Phew. Smells like cancer in there.” I readjusted my grip on