Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 61: Foothold (Patreon)

This was, of course, not the news that was broadcast on television that evening. Somehow the incident had been kept quiet; otherwise it would have sparked a fresh wave of panic and a paranoid surge in conspiracy theories. Those were currently focused on the radioactive metal falling from the sky and had split into two opposite camps. One part of the populace, as ever, shouted that the cultivators were poisoning mortals. At the same time, the other believed the chunks of metal were qi-saturated treasures that could help even the least gifted person reach the heights of cultivation. Some of the radioactive scrap had to be wrestled from such idiots by force, but that was the usual murk.

News that demons had seized one of our facilities would have stirred up other, far stronger emotions. It probably helped that the facility was located in one of Jupiter’s Trojans, a gigantic asteroid among hundreds of thousands of other rocks that had followed Jupiter along its orbit around the Sun for millennia, for millions of years.

The facility had a suspiciously familiar name, Beta Beta Beta, hinting at the real location of another facility I had already visited. Still, that knowledge gave me nothing. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, standing in a field in a neighbouring country among hundreds of identical haystacks.

Besides, the demons hadn't held it for long. We managed to evacuate around seven hundred staff, roughly half. Then the facility self-destructed.

“The facility was built on the assumption that they would try some trick and that one day the attempt would succeed,” Novak said during the news discussion. Present were Adam, Lina, Bat, and I. “At the very least, we had to plan our response for the event that the prisoners seized the base.”

Each of the seven hundred evacuees went through the scanners three times, then once more, because after the ‘half-dead Fours’ nobody trusted the scanners or their own eyes anymore.

The main question was how they had fooled the scanners. What’s more, our fighters, the ones who had delivered the demons to the facility, hadn’t been squeamish about removing their spatial pockets the same radical way my team and I did: cutting off the hand along with the ring.

Nevertheless, after coming back to life, the demons had changed their armour and taken weapons from spatial pockets they shouldn't have had. That was less surprising than the fact that they had somehow got hold of portals, through which horned reinforcements had come.

I very much hoped all those reinforcements had died along with the half of our staff we couldn't save. If there had been a couple of Sixes among them, the exchange really wasn’t so bad, however ugly it was to put it that way.

We had a fairly coherent picture of what had happened, since the base commander had uploaded all archived recordings via null-link before pressing the self-destruct button. But they showed only the picture: a swift, aggressive takeover of the base by a portal-assault force. Because of the spatial constraints of the premises, none of the cultivators could cut loose properly, and it looked more like a corridor shoot-out with powerful shotguns that tore through the stone walls like cardboard.

The assault force was strong and well trained, but whether they were Fives, Sixes, or perhaps adequately equipped Fours, it was impossible to determine with any certainty. Opinion leaned towards Fives, since the first pair had been definitively identified as Sixes by their second set of armour and weapons. That information came from Aoran's intelligence package.

Over the next few days, they identified another half-dozen elite fighters, though it was a considerable stretch. The death of one of them was also confirmed, since his armoured body drifted right past a camera mounted on a neighbouring asteroid. Plenty of things floated out there, but mostly as biomass rather than bodies.

I couldn’t help recalling my last visit to the hospital. The fact that the operator had delayed our transfer so long back then, yet still hadn’t let the demon’s body into the hospital, now made a great deal more sense.

That memory dragged another along with it: the body of the enemy cultivator and Mardal’s body had been sent to a special facility.

Beta-Beta-Beta?

Novak said it wasn’t the only facility of its kind we had, but we had temporarily stopped taking prisoners.

I began to feel haunted by the sense of a great battle approaching, and I started preparing: getting used to my spare armour and controlling the Trouble Generators with the Space Discs and the Obsidian Chainsaw.

The slope above the residence was an ideal training ground. Thin, cold air, snow, rocks, and nobody for kilometres around whom I might accidentally slice. True, I could trigger an avalanche. But because debris still fell to the ground, they happened here often enough anyway. Less often now, as the stream had thinned out and the sky no longer burned. Sometimes the traces of an impact even faded completely.

I was training when Lina phoned and told me to come back. Her voice promised no pleasant news.

Novak wasn’t there; even Bat had disappeared somewhere. Adam and Lina were the only people at the base. They were watching a live news broadcast on the big television in the common room. A glass building was being blown apart from the inside. Behind the glass, lightning flashed; fire, silver and gold mixed with who knows what else.

It was impossible to mistake it for anything else. These were combat techniques.

And the glass building, judging by the lawn, the car park, and the trees, was on Earth.

And this was live.

I had the impression that this was the great battle I had been waiting for.

“When do we set off?” I asked.

“We’re not going in there!” she said. “There’s a group at least on par with the one that wrecked Beta-Beta-Beta. We’re just meat to them!”

“Fine,” I said, and dropped into an armchair. “Then I need details. What’s going on?”

“Rehabilitation Centre 3G,” Adam said, eyes on the screen. “Fifteen minutes ago it was attacked by demons.”

“How?” I asked, since the details mattered and Lina was in no hurry to share.

“How the hell should I know!” Lina snapped, in an angry Zola style.

“Through portals, evidently,” Adam explained. “There are no details, mate. The media are ahead of the official government channels. Don’t even expect analysis.”

I noticed Lina wasn’t angry for nothing: her eyes darted around, scanning invisible lines of the interface, and she hadn’t even picked up a tablet.

I did. I needed a decent background for the text.

So, the centre stood in a valley, thirty kilometres from the nearest town. It had once been a private clinic for wealthy mortals, hence the glass, the lawns and the car park. After the invasion began, they requisitioned the building for wounded cultivators. An ideal place to recover: quiet, green, far from the bustle.

Meanwhile, the picture on the television changed again. The footage was being shot from the air, evidently by a civilian drone. The zoom was decent, but it kept losing focus. The glass block of the centre had already lost at least half its glass. Half the facade had spilt onto the lawn, and flashes lit up inside through the holes. Now and then something flew out of the broken windows. Sometimes objects, sometimes people in pale blue jumpsuits, sometimes parts of them, which the press AI immediately covered with a filter.

The presenter in the studio was saying something, but his voice had become thin and fast, and he repeated several times that Earth’s best cultivators had been sent to resolve the problem, which meant Sixes.

“Is the Master there?” I asked.

“I doubt it. He left for Beta-Beta-Pi a few minutes before this mess began. Security protocols won’t let him port in directly. And I’m not even sure the portals are still working.”

As if to confirm it, the drone spotted a group of cultivators racing toward the site on jet boards. There were seven of them, and they flew in a wedge, like fighter jets at a parade.

At the same moment, demons leapt out of the building and scattered. They spread out in a circle, leaving equal gaps between one another, as if they had rehearsed it a hundred times. As soon as they stopped, each pulled a man-high black obelisk from a spatial pocket.

“They’re going to raise a defensive array!” I said.

“They won’t have time,” Adam said, pointing to the resolute cultivators on the boards.

“There are more demons,” I said again.

“But let’s hope they don’t have an endless supply of those obelisks,” Adam said again.

He thought the same as our lads. As soon as the first of them reached striking range, he fired at an obelisk. It was, of course, a Finger. Judging by the red colour of the beam, Hale’s type, it was Finger-Fire.

The beam bit into the obelisk a moment before the demon shielded it with his body, but the job seemed done, and the demon didn’t test how long his formations would hold under the beam; he fell back.

Another demon flew out of the building to meet the combat wedge without a board or any visible flight gear. He pushed off from a broken third-floor window and, an instant later, was in the middle of the wedge.

Three cultivators at once, the wedge leader and the two beside him, flew apart in halves. I didn’t even see whether their defensive formations flared, and the TV channel’s AI didn’t immediately grasp what had happened, so the body halves were blurred only at the last moment.

That gave the demon enough time to deal with the rest of our team. This time techniques did flare: the silver of a Fist, lightning, everything merged into one great fireball, from which jetboards and halved corpses tumbled, while the demon remained hanging in the air.

“Fuck, it’s him!” Adam said. “It’s Ghaurzakh.”

“The head of the clan came out himself to cut down our people on the lawn in front of a hospital?” I asked doubtfully.

“Maybe not Sixes, but there were Fives there at the very least. Even a Seven couldn’t have dealt with them that quickly?” Adam said.

I looked closely at his horns. Yes, they had the same distinctive violent curve I had seen on Aoran’s hologram, but there he had been without armour. I should familiarise myself better with the data.

Ghaurzakh turned unhurriedly and drifted back towards the building, behind the ring of obelisks. The demon who had retreated from the damaged obelisk stood in the same spot again and had already replaced it with a new one.

“An orbital strike wouldn’t go amiss right about now!” I said.

Too late. The ring closed.

Red lines rose from the obelisks to the sky. They formed the facets of a force field, drawn over with a transparent purple sheet that covered the site in a dome. The glass block, the car park, the lawn with the bodies in pale blue jumpsuits, all of it remained inside.

Ghaurzakh could be seen through the force field; he slowly made his way under the roof and disappeared from view.

The TV channel’s drone began circling above the dome. The operator probably didn’t know why himself, but he kept the shot steady. In the studio, someone finally spoke, something about the situation being under control, but the voice sounded like someone forcing himself to say words he didn’t believe.

And then, high above the dome, something flashed. The operator managed to tilt the camera up in time to see a white streak plunge onto the dome.

The screen went white; then flickered with interference, and instead of the rehabilitation centre, a rather flustered presenter appeared, announcing from the studio that an orbital strike had been carried out.

I had a bad feeling that the array had withstood it, but there was no way to check.