Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 62: Footage and Hysteria (Patreon)

“The dome hasn’t been breached,” Lina said before the disappointed presenter could say the same.

Someone off camera had probably explained to him that you don’t spread panic on live television, and he did another U-turn, announcing a second strike, a nuclear one.

I doubted that reassured the viewers glued to their screens.

“Lina,” I said, asking her to comment.

Whatever feeds her eyes were following, she got the information faster than I did.

I knew where to look for information on Verdis, but on Earth’s network I could only rely on news aggregators, instantly flooded with clickbait headlines about the strike on the rehabilitation centre and empty, auto-generated texts whose sheer word count contrasted sharply with their pitiful substance.

This time the presenter beat Lina to it, proudly showing a nuclear mushroom cloud rising behind a four-lane highway through open fields, split down the middle by a crash barrier. It was evidently a live feed from a public traffic camera. Cars driving away from the mushroom were tearing along like lunatics, while those heading toward it were turning round on the spot, swerving into the field and doubling back, which had already caused several crashes.

The channel must have realised it was only spreading panic, so it took the picture down. The presenter reported a hit and fell silent. His face turned grey; he froze. The channel cut the broadcast and put up a holding screen.

“The dome survived,” Lina said again.

I just shook my head. That was obvious. The big bad wouldn’t have shown up here if he hadn’t been sure he was safe.

Then again, I knew very little about Eights. Even in the Federation, rumours about them outnumbered facts.

Surviving several megaton nuclear strikes was one of those rumours. I hadn’t believed it, but…

I glanced at Adam and Lina. He stared gloomily at the holding screen on the television; her eyes darted across feeds I couldn’t see.

“I’ll make some tea,” I said. “Old Well? A clear head wouldn’t hurt right now.”

“Yes,” Adam said, waving a hand. Lina didn’t answer.

My body wanted something to do, but I knew I could do nothing in this situation. So I chose tea. And I brewed it as though something depended on it.

The familiar aroma drifted through the kitchen. Instead of clearing my thoughts, it reminded me of my recent conversation with my master.

The sensible thing would have been to run.

I waited until the tea brewed, set the cups on a tray, and carried them into the common room.

Lina grabbed hers with her left hand without looking and nearly spilt it. Her right hand was busy flicking chaotically through her interface.

Adam took his cup with his left hand too. With his right, he was switching channels. They were all showing the same thing: the mushroom over the highway, the red-and-purple dome against the hills, the worried faces of presenters. About twenty minutes later, one of the studios started drawing blast-radius circles.

Then someone posted a phone video to the network, filmed from the roof of a house on the outskirts of the nearest town. An idiotic move, but people are full of idiocy. The video would surely go viral and bring its author some fame, if he survived the radiation.

The blast hadn’t reached the town, but the fire had. The forest in the valley and on the slopes of the hills went up at once, for kilometres. The fire didn’t just burn, it raged. First the outskirts closest to the forest caught alight, and ash began falling on the streets like snow.

Radioactive snow.

Newly arrived cultivators in Yellow Pine’s armour were trying to bring the fire under control, while the media stopped holding back. Half the channels dropped their measured tone and switched to words presenters had no right to say on air. Shouting, weeping, demands to name whoever had given the idiotic order.

We were stuck watching this madness. Time lost all meaning, and we couldn’t tear our eyes away from the disaster unfolding live.

In the footage from the town, people walked to the way out on foot because cars were stuck in traffic. Young, old, children. All wore masks, scarves, and wet towels wrapped around their faces. Ash settled on their shoulders and hair. Soldiers at the checkpoints, in hazmat suits, waved dosimeters, sorting people into those who could pass straight through and those sent to the tents for decontamination.

There were queues by the tents — long, silent ones. People undressed right there in the street, threw their clothes into containers, and stepped under foam and cold water from fire hoses. A mother with a child in her arms, in her underwear, was shivering under the jet, and the child was screaming.

Someone in the queue coughed so hard that the arms pulled them out.

How many of those being evacuated would live even a few more years? They were mortals, not cultivators, and this world’s miraculous medicine had far more modest miracles for them.

Lina stood up abruptly, finally spilling her tea. She hadn’t even taken a sip.

“Enough watching this,” she said, and practically ordered: “Turn it off! Footage of the incursion has been uploaded to a server I have access to. Make yourselves useful and join the analysis.”

Adam switched off the television, and Lina sent us the link.

I went to fetch my tablet. I couldn’t work against a transparent background the way Lina could. Especially not when watching video.

The portal hall had probably once been the atrium of a private clinic. A glass roof, pale walls, potted palms that someone hadn’t wanted to throw out after the requisition. Platforms in the middle, the standard layout, like at 7B, but squeezed into a smaller space. There were fewer people here, though, less traffic. And only one guard in armour.

The timestamp read 18:45. According to the schedule, two platforms were operating at that minute. But the events weren’t happening by those.

A technician drew everyone’s attention to a portal against the hall wall a moment before it activated, and a demon leapt out, a flaming sword at the ready.

Red armour, golden horns, a long straight blade. I knew that armour and that sword. The description was in Aoran’s materials, and after capturing Beta-Beta-Beta, I’d familiarised myself with every enemy above a Five.

It was the big bad’s favourite Nephew. Judging by how quickly he leapt out of the portal after activation, he hadn’t had time to check that the transit was safe, so he was once again proving his loyalty to his uncle by risking his life.

We all spotted him at roughly the same moment and exchanged glances. So we’d all recognised him.

I didn’t keep watching. What came next was obviously a massacre. I was interested in what had happened before it. I went through several recordings until I found the angle that best showed me the technician before the activation.

From his posture, he looked bored. I didn’t know what protocols technicians followed now, but this one leaned back in his chair and watched the new arrivals two platforms away. He even yawned, then raised his tablet. A cultivator model: on camera, the tablet’s screen was solid black, with the whole image going straight into its owner’s interface. All we could see was his finger sliding across the glass.

He tapped the screen a few more times and leapt out of his chair as if stung. This time I understood that he’d shouted for the guard.

“Idiot,” Lina said, so weary it was as if she knew the technician personally. “He was having a private chat. On a work tablet, on duty, at the portal hall’s control desk.”

“A Trojan?” I asked. “I never knew much about hacking methods, but I had an AI that did something like that pretty slickly.”

Lina nodded.

“The Trojan imitated the technician’s digital signature. To the system, it looked as though the technician had switched the portal on himself and entered the address.”

“Doesn’t it look to you as though he laughed right before that?” Adam asked.

From my angle, you couldn’t see that.

“Maybe,” Lina said. “A girl was messaging him?”

“We’ve got a traitor? How is that possible?” Adam asked. “I don’t mean people’s capacity for betrayal; I mean the demons’ capacity to make contacts on Earth without setting foot on it. Did we miss a spy from the previous invasion?”

It was possible, but doubtful. Everything pointed to Sery having been the last one.

“Another question,” I added, “is where they got a portal compatible with our formats.”

“War,” Adam answered philosophically.

“Then what the hell is the point of all this analysis?” I nearly snapped. “How did the demons break into the rehabilitation centre? War!”

“They took one as a trophy,” Adam explained, displeased.

“Where?” We had fairly serious security and self-destruct protocols for critical infrastructure. “Especially since it’s not an evac portal you could pick up in the field; it’s a full-sized one.”

“The same kind that’s installed on the fleet’s ships, the kind that was at the bases under the demons’ wormhole. There was enough scrap there for the demons to reproduce it.”

“No,” I said doubtfully. “If they’d had a portal since then, they’d have tried something like this earlier.”

“Unless it all comes back to our ‘traitor’,” Lina said.

“Have you got the transit data? What address did the Trojan dial?” I asked.

Lina shook her head.

“Only video. Wait…”

While she worked her magic, I decided to watch the massacre. Unpleasant as it was, I needed to know what the enemy could do.

I rewound to the moment the ‘Nephew’ leapt out of the portal and immediately located the hall's only armoured cultivator. The soles of his feet flared with flame, hurling him through the crowd at the guard, whom he brushed aside with his sword. One stroke left a dozen cut and burnt bodies behind it. Vezhkar attacked the guard. The flaming blade sliced through formations and armour with the same ease his uncle would later use to cut down our rapid-response group. Except his uncle’s sword didn’t burn.

Almost as quickly, new demons leapt out of the portal one after another, less than half a second apart, and immediately joined the massacre. The first one, after Vezhkar, swung his axe, and the unlucky technician’s head split in two.

It was only a matter of fractions of a second, but the wounded, half-healed Earthlings were already pulling on armour straight from their pockets. That ought to have slowed the aggressors down, but it didn’t.

I recognised three of them: they were Sixes. Another three were probably Fives, and what happened to one of them brought me enormous satisfaction. Unfortunately, it wasn’t one of our fighters who beat him; the defence systems did.

All the portals in the hall crackled and sparked at once, and thick black smoke poured out of every ring.

The last demon had managed to push his head through, but it wasn’t cut off. He was flayed. The membrane vanished, but he kept forcing his way through the hole in space, which was still shrinking. As if he knew the same membrane-stabilising trick I did, but lacked the strength or skill to pull it off.

Starting from the line between his shoulder blades, the portal let less and less of his body through. It bit through the armour easily, but got stuck on the body, as though it resisted the warping of space. The portal stripped off his skin and flesh and gnawed into his spine, sharpening the demon’s body like a stubby pencil, with a white spine in place of black graphite.

What fell onto the platform was missing half its body and was in agony. He was suffering far more than our fighters had, but he was still alive, and they were dead.

The hall had been cleared.

Vezhkar looked around and, right where he stood, pulled a massive portal from his spatial pocket, the same type as the one in the ‘tin can’. The portal immediately filled with a membrane.

Vezhkar stepped back. Dropped to one knee. Bowed his head.

Ghaurzakh stepped out of the membrane.

While he surveyed the hall like an owner inspecting his new property, other demons were already running out of the portal: the ones who had set up the obelisks.

The big bad nodded, and Vezhkar rose.