World 034: Unverifiable
"You fight well, Princess of Fire. But you will never defeat me with flame alone." The battle between Zettai and Fire Princess had left miles of scorched woods in their wake. "Why.." But the latter only tired herself out more with each attack, while the ace duelist only expended the infinite energy of her sky striker arsenal. "Why do you hate us so!? What makes us different? We feel pain just like you do!" All that anger the Princess felt at the start had evaporated and been replaced with sadness and despair. "The fact that your grief is real does not mean you deserve mercy. I do not hate you as an entity, I hate that you as a concept. An artificial soul is an affront to nature itself. There is no place in this world for another breed of life. It is either you or us, and we outnumber you a billion to one. It is only logical to smother you before you threaten us!" Zettai aimed her cannon at the ADI's face. "You can still try to duel me with what little power you have left, I will grant you that much. But either way, your fate is set in stone. There is nowhere to run or hide. What will you do?" Neither roaring inferno nor blackening smoke would distract her from finishing this once and for all.
"Zettai!" Nor would a loudmouth like Wagnerok distract her. "Wagner of the Wagneroks.. Why are you here?" The ace snarled at the valkyrian while her eyes remained fixated on the Fire Princess. "Things have changed. We're headed back to the throne room." He explained with clear frustration in his voice. Zettai had no interest in finding out why. "What coul Void possibly want?" Zettai had no interest in anything but the ADI. But even she could not avoid an involuntary reaction when Wagner said the following. "Zettai. He's not Void."
"!? What?" Zettai turned her face towards him. "!" And the Fire Princess seized the opportunity, unleashing all her remaining power in a massive focused stream. "Rgh! Damn it!" The ace returned fire with a Vector blast and let the two attacks explode against each other. "Where did she go?" The smoke provided the ADI with enough cover to make it to the still unburned sections of the forest and vanish behind the trees. "You must really be desperate to cling to life this much." In a way she could respect the Princess for her tactics, but that would not stop her from blowing up the whole place to flush her out. "We do not have time for that, Zettai! This is more important!" Wagnerok shouted once more. "Nothing is more important than destroying her kind!" Zettai snarled while she kept firing shots into the woods. "Then what if I tell that Void IS one of their kind?"
"..." Again, she paused to glare at the Valkyrie duelist. "Explain."
...
When Schwarzwald returned to the castle to answer for his failure, he left his allies in various states of mood. "You lost it? Ghahahaha! I can't believe you! The high and mighty Baron lost to an infant who never dueled before!" Donna Monday enjoyed seeing him grovel at the feet of Void's throne. "Fascinating, so are you still forced to tell the truth now? Do tell me when that effect wears off.." Scarlet Fever saw this as a chance to learn more, as she did with everything. "Oh you're really in for it now, heehee." And Chiaroscura just wanted to know what kind of punishment he would endure for his mistakes, and if she could help bring those punishments to life.
"You disappoint me." Void himself, in the worst mood of all, said the least. He did not need to express his anger, everyone around could feel it. "I have no excuses, Void. I can only hope that Khan will succeed where I fail." If he wanted too, Schwarzwald could have tried to dump the blame on his tagpartner Heleil, it had been her attack that cost them both the duel after all. But he knew Void did not want to her apologies. "Unfortunately for you and him both, he did not. I can sense that control of the chalice has not returned to me." Void spoke with one hand tightly clenching the armrests of the throne. "There was always a chance that we would lose out on one of the seven." The baron meekly pointed out, which caused Void to snap and break off one armrest with sheer force. "Heh. I hope you are not suggesting that it's my fault for giving you the the chalice in the first place? The item was your responsibility. You let me and it down. I've already put most of its power in the arena beyond. Even so, it could become an eyesore in their hands... In His hands."
"Forget about the damn item. What about the champions? If Heleil knows, its only a matter of time before the whole shebang finds out what we really are! Besides, why are we just blaming him? When its clearly her mess too!" Donna nudged towards he scarlet lady. "Her? What did she do?" Asked the increasingly more excited Chiaroscura. "Her ADIs attacked me! Twice! You told me it was just a fluke, a technical bug! But what kind of bug makes a thing like that happen twice? What if it happens to the rest of your stoodges!" The only two proxy-ADIs that remained with Scarlet: Madolche Puddingcess and Shadoll Construct, flanked her from both sides.
"I was mistaken." Scarlet replied calmly. "I thought the ADI was either acting randomly or possibly influenced by Echo's commands. But it is clear now that it has its own autonomy and a portion of my memories. It may even believe itself to be ... me. I never accounted for the possibility that one would turn on the other, which is why the rogue ADI could sneak up on the others. It wont happen again." She would be keeping her remaining pair close with her at all times now. "Little late, doncha think? What good are miss taste-me and miss touch-me gonna do anyway? We needed the other ones more!" Donna howled. Without Mozarta, they could not protect themselves from the World Wand's power. And the chaos and disorder that broke out hours ago was a result of them losing Medusa's allseeing eyes. "This wouldn't have happened if you just did your own duels! Your avatar's been restored, so why do you still need proxies?! Are you just too much of a chicken to fight!?" The wrestler demanded to hear an answer. "Hm.. Maybe we should test that theory?" The ex-doctor met her challenge with a tilted grin. "What? You're really asking for it!" Donna would have let her have it too.
"That's enough!" But they were interrupted by the arrival of Wagnerok and Zettai. "If we fight each other, what does that accomplish?" Zettai looked at the arguing duelists with disgust. Wagner on the other hand, saved his scowls for Void. "I can tell you what that accomplishes. It may bring us closer to who we used to be. It may do that to all of us." He looked around a bit just to confirm that Khan had not come back yet. Now he felt good about retreating from the scene early, since now he alone could share the truth with everyone. "Except for one. Because he is not like us after all. Schwarzwald knew this already. And Scarlet figured it out on her own too I imagine. But I am here to tell the rest of you about Him!" Now he did the accusing, pointing his finger at the duelist on the throne. "Don't deny it now.. I know who you are, Static!"
"Static? Wha?" Chiaroscura and Donna spun around to stare the cyberse duelist down. "Is that true?"
"Heh. Well done, you two. Did you figure that out all by yourself?" Void responded with a slow clap and a sarcastic chuckle. "You're not denying it?" Zettai cursed. She came in with certain expectations of how things would play out. A casual confession was not not one of them. "There is no point in secrets anymore, now is there? Because HE has come back. You saw him, I imagine. Void... Charles Adami. The person whose loathsome appearance I am now forced to carry. The duelist whose insipid voice I am now required to speak with. That is not me. No.. I am Mister Static." He got up from the throne and bowed before the others, sounding absolutely livid throughout his speech. "I should have known. Why the lies? Why the deception!" The ace duelist vocalized her own anger in kind. "What does this change? Zettai? I am still the one who set you free, and I plan to keep doing that to the rest of humanity." Void stayed at the same volume and pace. "But you are not one of us! You're inhuman, so why do you care for humanity?!"
"That is where you are wrong. I am more human than any of you." Void claimed and let out a deep sinister laugh. "I am all of you combined. I am your essence, your true nature. I am the hatred that flows, the passion that drives, the desire that inspired. Where would you be without me? You will yell at me and ask me why I lied in the first place. And I will say it was for your sake, to settle you into your new roles and to allow you to adapt to my own. Had I revealed myself too early, you would have lost the desire to impress me. You would have aimlessly wandered the infinite void of this world. I gave you purpose."
"Our purpose? Our roles? Then what are we, your pawns? We're not on the same level, that's for damn sure." The infectious mistrust among the 'heroes' spread to Donna Monday as well. "Not pawns. Disciples. You are the first of many. Or do you not want this anymore? Do you want to go back to who you used to be, and give up on STHEREA altogether? That can be arranged. You should never forget that your power comes from me. The items power also comes through me. Certainly I will not deny any of you the right of challenge. But do you believe you can lead better than me? Do you believe you can keep going just on your own?" Void eyed Wagner in particular as he spoke, sensing that he of all duelists around showed the most resistance in his mannerisms. "Maybe I can." Wagner was also bold enough to express this confidence. There were other things he wanted to say. Yet like all of Static Void's allies, he felt an innate instinct to follow just this one entity. "But what is your plan then, oh great leader?"
"Heh. I suppose we can start by shedding all pretenses." With those words Void enacted his next step. He manifested the World Ark in his hands and made the whole castle rumble. "!?" The whole crew rushed outside to see the cause of the commotion. "Amazing." A near speechless Scarlet stared at the sky, and the Arena Beyond that occupied it. The spiraling tower slammed down into the middle of the courtyard, merging with the royal capitol sector as a whole.
"Surprised? Don't be. This is merely where I relocated my arena too." Void smirked and waited for the shaking to finally die down. "The next step will be to fully bring Veyron into the fold. We do not need him and Sigment both, and he will be easier to convert. Once we have the seventh item, we can pour the last bit of the creators energy into the Beyond and complete it." The arena already looked tall enough to rival the mythical tower of babel, another boost would make it pierce the skybox. "And then what happens? Is this what the items were always meant for?" The inquisitive Scarlet pondered out loud. "Yes. It's all part of the game. A game that Echo cannot hope to win now. With the seven legacies combined, we can break the barrier between realities and turn the whole world in our own immortal paradise."
"Well all I hear is that I can finally ditch this." Chiaroscura threw away her dusted robes again to reveal her sharply dressed avatar underneath. No sense in hiding some cosmetic changes when the landscape itself got remodeled. "This is gonna make a lot of people go crazy and turn them against us, right?" She said with a giddy tone and could not wait for the fighting to start. "They might raise a few eyebrows. Or they may not." Void dismissed the World Ark and conjured up the World Lance. "It all depends. The champions now know, and Charles... Charles has come back. But it will still be their word against a world that already believes Echo's corruption to be real. And at the very least Schwarzwald's failure has shown us that we are not so easily defeated." He gave the black baron a playful grin, before turning to the rest. "There is no sense in playing nice anymore. Charles may have brought allies with him as well. Find them, along with any other loose ends. Whoever does this for me, will replace Schwarzwald as my new second. However, leave Charles and Echo alone. I have a different approach in mind for them."
Everyone liked the sound of that. "Allies huh?" But Chiaroscura remembered something specific about Void.. about Charles Adami. And she knew how to take advantage of that.. with her World Armor.
...
"It's been an hour now." Said Crescent Aurora. "I know that, down to the second. But we have to take this slowly." Vigionair replied. This unlikely duo got saddled with the regrettable task of having to wander STHEREA on foot, taking the safest non-hyperpace route possible. "Trust me, we are getting closer." If it had not been for his cloaking technology, they likely would have been spotted a long time ago. They were not exactly covered well out in the open fields of the wetland sector, nor were they very quiet. "But so much can happen in an hour." Crescent knew that others would be even less lucky. If it had not been for V, she would never have moved at all. "There is only one way to know for sure. After all, it's not like we can expect them to come to us."
"Guess again!" They came. Not through teleportation, but by phasing in from out of thin air. A whole slew of them in fact: several champions, various elements of Echo's own club, a rather oddlooking Aromage,and the talkative Madam Blanche... "V! Crescent! You're both here? Boy talk about lucky!"
"Gaaah!" Vigionair immediately reacted with an unexpectedly loud scream. "How did you.. Where did you come from? How did you see through my cloak? And who are you?" He could not be optimistic until everything he just saw happen also made sense. "Vigionair, its me. Charles.. The real Void." They could clear one thing easily enough. "Void?" Both he and Crescent looked up with astonishment as they began to recognize more traits of the cyberse duelist. Madam Blanche helped settle their doubts by simply nodding in the background. "You are telling me that there are two Voids? But... how? And how did you even find us?" The encrypter could not even begin to formulate all the questions he wanted to throw Void's way.
"The same way you found Crescent I suppose, by analyzing hyperspace's most recent traffic data. You are fortunate too that we found you first. If my limited resources can see through your disguise, than Static surely can as well." The frankensteined ADI took over the conversation, alerting them both to the fact that this also was someone they knew. "Scarlet?" Crescent blinked twice when she heard the voice, which sounded more like the former doctor than any of her proxies ever did. "Yeah this is Scarlet Rose, the Scarlet that's less evil? Maybe? Trust me, you don't want the full version of her story right now." Blanche quickly put the kibosh on any major Scarlet-themed exposition. "Scarlet Rose. Scarlet and Rosemary. Aha." Crescent got the gist of it at least.
"A second Scarlet? Lord help us all, one seems bad enough." Vigionair had to take a minute to process the news. But the fact that everyone else seemed to be condoning her presence made him begrudgingly accept her as well. "Well you are right, of course. Fortunately I could use my hyperspace tool to track the progress of everyone else who fell into that trap at the Arena Beyond. I am glad I held onto it, because without it I would have been just as helpless as you. Though apparently you weren't as helpless as I thought. While I spent several hours just tracking down miss Aurora, you managed to collect almost everyone."
"Well almost everyone. Acrates and Heleil are out there to try and locate Sigment and Veyron. Hopefully he can convince them, like we were convinced. And we were still looking for the Fire Princess, I believe that was her name?" Dyzanthium turned to Echo's group, which had gotten much smaller. "Yes. And Mephistar too!" Cierze the Harpy Lady shrieked. "If he is still alive." The Fisherman added morosely. "He has to be!" She shrieked back.
"Just them? What about..." Crescent spoke up again, because one name did not come up on its own. "Valkyrion did not make it." Echo herself revealed the truth, stating it quickly and passionlessly. "Oh.. No. I am sorry for.. that." Crescent rarely knew what to say to those that were in pain, especially when she hardly knew the person they lost. "You do not have to say sorry." The girl in the wheelchair tried to keep a smile on her face, but she had to be grieving. If anything it seemed strange that her friends did not say anything about Valkyrion at all. Cierze even seemed downright cheery the way she stared at Echo and waited for her to say more. "It will not happen again. I know where the Fire Princess is now. We should go to her next." It was Echo then that provided the direction, to salvage what could be salvaged.
"I agree. But there is something I should do first." Charles opened his hand and showed off a very tiny World Chalice. "Is that what I think it is?" Vigionaire gasped.
"Yes. Echo informed me about your current ailment. And it appears I have just the remedy. After all the time you have spent inside the network, you should at least get the choice to leave it. Though if I do this, you will likely be forced to log out immediately." The chalice wielder enlarged the cup and took off the lid. "That sounds like a gift I can not say no to! Because I can do a lot more good from out there, than in here!" The encrypter did not hesitate for even a second and kneeled before Charles. "That didn't take him long. Be careful though! Its pretty cold!" Blanche shouted while Charles poured some of the purifying water over V's back. "Gaha!" Instantly he felt a jolt of icy electricity run up and down his spine, reaching every end of his virtual nerve. The chalice purged the curse of the World Armor, returning Vigionair to a proper user of STHEREA. And with that came all the rules and limits, including the time limit. "I'll be back as soon as I am better equipped. Until then, good luck to you all." He looked around one last time, saw Crescent nod at him to express her gratitude and let himself get booted from the system.
"I suppose we should be going back offline soon too. Our options are too restricted down here. We can better contain the crisis with the resources of Exeter and the Investigation team. We can also maybe alert the families of everyone affected so far, and see if some of them have returned already like Bionis or Hydra." Dyzanthium suggested. "You do that. I'll stay with the boss for a bit longer. He still needs to tell me what the hell happened to him after all." Blanche said with a wink thrown in at Charles. "Yes. But we can do that on our way to the next destination. Dyzanthium. I thank you for what you've done. I hope you can get the company to see the threat before it gets out of control."
...The champion left on good terms as well, making sure to remember his warning. Afterwards, Charles showed Crescent the way they now traveled. Not through hyperspace, but through the subconscious layer beneath STHEREA as a whole. "Are you sure you don't want to go back? Nobody will hold it against you." To his surprise, Crescent came along with them on their journey towards the Fire Princess. She rejected the power of the Chalice, even if that meant she would remain helpless. "There is nothing I can do for Wagner out there, isn't there? If I leave.. I would just see his trapped body, and his mother and father.. They would want to know what happened..." Crescent hated it, but she knew she was not ready for such a confrontation. At the very least the champions and the investigators knew enough to be able to inform Wagner's family himself, but she still felt guilty about staying. "I understand. Trust me, I do not want to return either. I've gone through a lot to even get here. And most of that was just luck." Charles sighed. He and Crescent were the same in that regard.
"Yeah about that. Where are you going back too? All you said was that you were at some fancy spacecenter or something."
"It's not a spacecenter, Blanche. I am not sure if I know what it really is.. But they intercepted me soon after Static threw me out of the network, telling me I would be arrested for joining Millennium. Then they offered me a deal to get out on good behavior if I helped them with their experiments, me and Alpha and Cherry. They were there as well, captured just like me. We never trusted them, but we did need them. Without them I wouldn't have been able to get back here. And now I am different.. not an avatar anymore. It does not even feel like the kind of freedom I had when I wielded a Legacy Item." Charles rubbed the bracelet around his arm, still not knowing when the thing would activate on its own. "They said they were a research center dedicated to studying the subconscious, a separate facility from Exeter. Since all of STHEREA is just a dressing to disguise the fact that Exeter is actually tapping into the minds of anyone who uses it, I can see that part being true. In any case, those people simply made their own smaller fake reality and that let me cross over."
"Fascinating." The one most intrigued by what Charles said was the Scarlet woman of science of course. "This lines up exactly with many of my own theories. I knew Exeter under-estimated the potential of their own creation, and they did not even create it." She came off as slightly offended as well. "I thought the Creator made this world?" Echo interrupted. "Ah yes the mysterious genius. It would probably be more apt to say he discovered it. Perhaps he never realized what he'd done by linking so many minds together, not until you were born. Either way this is excellent news for us."
"It is?" Blanche raised an eyebrow. "Certainly. As I said, the minds that were trapped before should have been freed upon their defeat. And now their consciousness may be wandering the void that were are now moving through. Charles said he found Blanche before, which means we should be able to find the others as well. We simply need to focus on visions that mean something to them. And fortunately one of us has absorbed all their memories into her very core." Scarlet Rose smirked as she looked at Miss Echo. "She did what now?" Blanche twitched. "The memory archive, we took it. Because Miss Echo wanted to make new friends." Rose casually admitted and pointed at the small glowing sphere on Echo's wheelchair. Echo herself looked like she did not feel very proud about it anymore.
"The memory... You mean Project Flute: the program that Exeter used to record everyone's thoughts and influence them?" Charles was surprised to hear it and could not help but stare at the Fisherman and Harpy. Whose memories did she use to make them? "I suppose it could have ended up in worse hands. Man, what else did Exeter use the network for anyway?" All of this left room to consider the things his 'new friends' could do with now that they had access to STHEREA. It did not lead to comforting thoughts. "Back up a minute by the way. Did you just say Alpha and Cherry were with you? Did they get the same funky avatar transition?" Blanche snapped him back to more pressing matters. "I.. Just Cherry. Alpha, actually his name is Tycho, could not come yet. And Cherry, I can only hope that she found a safe spot to be in. Or that she used the escape button." Charles caught himself glancing at his own 'button'. The only way to be sure about her fate, would be to leave STHEREA... and risk never coming back.
...
So close. She was so close. Cherry Anise did not want to go back yet. She did not care if the old world around her disappeared, because the sea of portals showed her the new. The one that caught her dragged her down into an snow-covered field, with sharp rocks strewn about. It looked empty, lifeless and bleak. Still, even this fragment of the network made her feel happier than anything in the real world had done. She could finally be herself, unseen and unheard by all. But she could not touch this world, or interact with it. That was her curse. Her...
"Aha!"
All of the sudden, she felt cold.. and the snow touched her feet. "What?" Something or someone made her solid, someone that could see her. "Found you! Cherry Anise!" She stood behind her, a girl in a black dress with dark long hair. "You must be glad to see a pretty face again. Well you're welcome!" Chiaroscura laughed, as she glowed with the power of the World Armor.
(To Be Continued in World 035: Towards the Subjective Truth)
