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

Touching the writing didn’t make it stop scrolling, but touching the image of Nocturne Lament did. When my fingers glanced over its shoulders, the feral-looking Warsinger vanished. It was replaced by a complicated, but blurry diagram of its heatsinks and other parts. A new text feed began to spool out beside it as individual parts and pieces were highlighted by glowing auras.

“Guys! I think I found the schematics!” I called out in excitement, leaning out to the side. “Rin? What do I do? It’s like a holographic A.R terminal, kind of?”

“What?! You activated it? Ack! Lemme down, lemme down!” Rin’s voice rang from the other side of the vault.

I tried cancelling out of the display, and with trial and effort, was able to get back to the wheel with the glowing circles. There, I tried selecting one of the un-lit circles. Nothing happened.

“The Schematics are tied to the Keystones,” I murmured. “One Warsinger per Keystone. Except for one, because there were ten Warsingers, but only nine stones.”

“Oh! I see it!” Rin scampered over, still trailing a long piece of rope. “Are these… Oh wow!”

“There’s diagrams for at least four Warsingers on this thing,” I said, swiping over one of the other lit circles. It took a few tries before the hologram actually opened and came into focus, revealing the tall, slim, noble figure of Radiant Eclipse. It was one of the more humanoid Warsingers, with a long spiraling lance, pointed feet, and a helmet styled like a unicorn’s head. “If this is like some kind of magitech computer… where is the data stored?”

“I don’t think ‘computer’ is the right term for what this is.” Rin bit her lip, chewing it as she excitedly scanned the text. “It’s more like a projector. The schematics are probably encoded onto some kind of storage item, like ruby mana or mana-forged lambidium. The box has a static rote—a spell that’s permanently woven into the machine—that activates when you feed the machine mana. You notice there’s no sound coming out of it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s because it doesn’t have any moving parts. The hologram is an illusion, a spell that’s showing us what’s on the plates.” Rin patted the side of the console. “If we break this open and remove the plates, we will have all the schematics. Then I should be able to reverse engineer this console, and we can build a new one in Myszno. It looks like a much older version of the map storage device we found in Withering Rose’s Chorus Vault.”

“Huh.” I opened my inventory and took out the crystal plates I’d recovered from the lab. “We also found these in a smaller machine inside one of the rooms we looked into. These might have information on the Drachan we can use.”

“Ooh.” Rin took them carefully, then added them to her inventory. “Kyanine? I’ve never heard of it.”

“Me either.” I flipped back to see the other two available Warsingers. The first was Pure Land, a goat-headed Warsinger with massive curled horns and a spiked warhammer. The second was Hanging Star—one of the floating Warsinger types, it had a stylized Meewfolk face, a long, pod like body, and no fewer than six sword-like arms that rested around it in a loose spiral. “There’s only nine schematics on this machine. We’re missing one.”

“There were only nine Warsingers, plus the prototype,” Rin said.

“Yeah. That’s what I mean.” I tapped the dial. “There’s only nine blueprints on this box, and one of them is Nocturne Lament.”

“Oh! Then…” Rin’s expression grew troubled. “The missing one has to be Withering Rose. It was built a couple hundred years after the first Warsingers were deployed.”

I reached up to squeeze my hair in exasperation. “Of course. The one set of blueprints we need aren’t here.”

“No, but we can figure out a lot about the technology used to make her from these diagrams. We might be able to repair Nocturne Lament first, and with that experience, we can piece out Withering Rose. Just remember: if it was built by mortals, it can be rebuilt by mortals.” Rin patted me on the arm. “Don’t worry! This is real progress!”

“HAH! GOT IT!” Gar let out a harsh bark of triumph from the carcass of Perilous Symphony. “Rin! I found the drive!”

“Great! Now we just have to figure out how to transport it without breaking anything.” Rin dashed her arm across her forehead, rubbing the condensation from it. “Phew… alright, leave this with me. I’m going to document everything I can before I take it apart.”

“Do you have crafting prompts, or are you just winging it?” I asked.

Rin giggled, pulling her toolbox out of hammerspace. “Oh, you know. A bit of Column A, a bit of Column B. But I need to do this alone, if you don’t mind. I get nervous working when people are behind me.”

“No worries.” I stepped back. “I’ll leave the Spear here. Let me know if you need me to do any Paragon mojo.”

“Yep!” She crouched down, plugged a pair of earplugs in, and began to tinker. “Can you go assist Gar with the sonic organs? He might need a hand.”

“I never thought I’d get to help a man with his sonic organs.” I muttered, shooting an amused glance at Rin.

Gar was still hanging from his bosun’s chair, muttering at and cursing the Warsinger as he tinkered with what looked to me like the brass columns of a church organ. Suri leaned back in her harness, keeping tension on the belaying rope as she stared off into space. Karalti had curled up in a little ball off to the side, snoozing with her hair over her face.

“How’s it going?” I called up to him.

“This fucking old piece of shit...” He banged on a mineralized plate of metal with the end of his wrench, scowling at it. “The AMEN is behind this panel, but