Chapter 384: The Anomaly
Iron Fortress Territory – Arcane Legion Garrison, Third Floor.
General Skele-Lust, currently in her Lich form, had her skeletal feet propped up
on her desk as she flipped through a novel brought back from the Eldritch Realm.
The book was a casual acquisition from her last excursion. The cover depicted a
human male with flowing hair, and the title read: [The Man Pursued by Five
Princesses Who Only Desired to Farm].
She found the logic of the plot quite amusing—statistically improbable, yet
strangely entertaining.
Beside her, two Liches from the Arcane Legion were engaged in a heated debate
over the parameters of a ritual array. Their voices grew increasingly loud,
until one of them began poking the other's sternum with a bony finger.
"I've told you three times! If the energy induction angle deviates by even two
degrees, the entire array is liquidated!"
"Were those two degrees calculated by your own processors or merely plagiarized?
You missed a decimal point last time and blew up half the laboratory, or have
you purged that archive?"
"That was a Logic Error! An accident!"
"You label every system crash an 'accident'!"
Lust turned a page, completely ignoring the discord. Life in Iron Fortress was a
predictable loop: researchers were either arguing, detonating experiments, or
arguing while detonating experiments. She had long since archived these
behaviors as background noise.
Then, she perceived it.
The sensation was fleeting and incredibly faint—as if someone had flicked her
ear with a finger before rapidly withdrawing.
Lust's feet snapped off the desk. She slammed the book face-down.
Her soul-fire contracted into two needle-thin points of light as her entire
processing capacity shifted to perception.
The Planar Core was oscillating.
The core of the Evernight Realm—the heart of the world they had monitored and
logged for an eternity—was manifesting a vibration that fell outside of standard
operational parameters.
Lust lunged to her feet, her chair skidding back half a meter and slamming into
the stone wall with a crack.
"SHUT. IT."
The two Liches instantly ceased their bickering and turned to face her.
Lust was already at the monitoring array, her hands pressed against the console,
her phalanges clicking with tension. The energy readouts were jumping
erratically. It looked messy—like something was struggling to manifest, then
pulling back into the void.
"Logic Error detected," she hissed.
She stared at the screen for three seconds before the values returned to zero.
Stable. Quiet. As if the fluctuation had never existed.
Lust glared at the flat energy curve, her soul-fire pulsing with agitation.
"Someone fetch Avarice. Manifest him here. Now. Immediately."
By the time Skele-Avarice arrived, Lust had already processed the raw data and
projected it onto a holographic light-screen that spanned an entire wall.
Avarice nearly tripped over the threshold as he entered, still clutching a stack
of research files he had been auditing with a State Army adjutant at the Transit
Hub. He appeared to have manifested directly from a teleportation array.
"Report. Your units practically dragged me out of the Hub without finishing
their introductory protocol. What is the status?"
"Look at this."
Lust stepped aside, pointing to a segment of data highlighted in crimson.
Avarice set his files down and leaned over the projection, auditing the
wave-forms for several long seconds. He remained silent.
He looked again. Still silence.
"You see it?" Lust's voice was sharp with urgency.
"Confirmed," Avarice stood straight. "An Awareness Awakening Wave."
"Exactly."
"Source coordinates?"
"Trace-failure," Lust replied, her tone radiating frustration. "The duration was
less than 0.3 seconds. By the time I initialized a localization protocol, the
signal had vanished. I couldn't even capture a vector."
Avarice fell silent. He walked to the console, pulled up the raw data, and
stretched the timeline to the finest possible increment, auditing the wave-form
frame by frame.
"The energy grade is low," he noted. "Peak equivalent to a Tier-4 or Tier-5
soul-fluctuation."
"I am aware of that."
"But the decay pattern is incorrect." Avarice pointed to the tail of the curve.
"In a standard Tier-4/5 awakening, the decay should be exponential, gradually
tapering to zero. But this wave… it was truncated mid-cycle. Cleanly
liquidated."
Lust leaned in. Indeed, the curve hadn't returned to zero naturally. It looked
as though it had been severed by a blade.
"Active Suppression," Lust blurted out.
"Correct," Avarice nodded. "Whatever this entity is, it realized it had been
spotted within 0.1 seconds of awakening and manually retracted its energy
output."
The two Sins exchanged a look.
An entity capable of performing a manual suppression in less than a tenth of a
second was indisputably not a mere Tier-4 or Tier-5 variable. Those levels were
simply the minimum energy "leak" from the moment of its manifestation. Its true
power-rating was hidden.
"This is a high-level Logic Error," Lust said, her mood for trashy novels
completely purged. "Something has woken up in the heart of the Evernight Core,
and we have zero coordinates."
Avarice didn't respond immediately; he was auditing a different thought-path.
"When was your last global sweep of the Planar Core?"
"Three cycles ago. Zero anomalies reported."
"Any special events manifest between then and now?"
Lust processed the history and shook her head. "Negative. Daily operations are
within standard margins. Zero anomalous energy inputs from the Transit Hub."
"Then it was a Spontaneous Awakening," Avarice's soul-fire dimmed slightly. "Not
triggered by an external variable. It woke up on its own."
The conclusion left them both in a state of clinical dread. An external trigger
could be traced. A spontaneous awakening implied that the entity had always
existed within the plane, dormant, until this moment.
"Should we report to the Sovereign?" Lust asked.
Avarice considered the variables. "We must. But the data is currently
insufficient. A 0.3-second spike with zero coordinates or energy-attribute
identification… the Master cannot make an audit based on such sparse
parameters."
"Then what is your recommendation?"
"Set the monitoring arrays to maximum sensitivity. 24-hour global sweep. If this
thing merely 'rolled over' and returned to sleep-mode, we will perform a
slow-burn audit. But if it manifests again, we must lock onto its coordinates."
Lust nodded, already recalibrating the array parameters. Avarice stood beside
her, watching the red data-points.
"Lust."
"Status?"
"You've functioned in the Evernight Realm longer than I. You've audited more
archives of the Old Era. Before the Sovereign unified the continent… were there
any 'Sleeping Entities' recorded in the lore?"
Lust's hands paused on the console. "You're implying..."
"I'm saying that before the Evernight Empire was established, the old powers—the
Theocracy, the Elven Forests, the Audery Empire—might have had something
higher-tier behind them."
Lust slowly lowered her hands. She turned around, leaning against the console.
Her soul-fire flickered erratically.
"There is a segment in the Imperial Historical Archives regarding the Old Era,"
she said, her voice becoming uncharacteristically somber. "Before this continent
was known as Evernight, it possessed an archaic name."
"State it."
"The Lostarn Realm."
Avarice furrowed his brow. He had seen the name in the database, but it was
usually archived as a defunct geographical term.
"In Lostarn," Lust continued, "the Theocracy didn't worship abstract doctrines.
They worshipped Actual Gods."
Avarice's soul-fire flared. "Gods?"
"Correct. Gods." Lust lowered her voice. "The Imperial archives lack detail
because when the Sovereign unified the continent, those 'Gods' no longer
existed. But I found older documents in the ruins of the Elven Forests."
"Content?"
"They claim Lostarn underwent a Great Cataclysm. The documents refer to it as
Ragnarok. After that event, all the Gods vanished."
"Vanished?"
"Or were liquidated," Lust paused. "At least, that was the historical
consensus."
Silence fell between them again. Avarice walked to the window, looking out at
the night sky over Iron Fortress. Grey clouds hung low, with the blue mana-glow
of distant Mage Towers shimmering through the mist.
"What if those Gods weren't fully liquidated?" he asked, not turning back.
Lust didn't answer. She was calculating the same probability.
"Maintain total silence regarding this audit," Avarice commanded, turning back.
"We divide the tasks. You monitor the core; I will dive into the Old Era
archives. I need more data on the Gods of Lostarn."
"And if it manifests again?"
"Then we see where it manifests," Avarice picked up his files and headed for the
door. "Coordinates are more useful than speculation."
Lust watched his silhouette vanish into the hallway before turning back to the
console. She pushed the sensitivity to the terminal threshold. The entire
garrison began to hum as energy consumption doubled.
The two Liches who had been arguing earlier now stood in the corner, motionless
and silent, not even daring to process a breath.
Lust sat back in her chair, staring at the screen. The energy curve remained
flat. Peaceful. As if nothing had happened.
She picked up the novel she had discarded, found her page, read two lines, and
closed it again. Her processors couldn't handle the fiction anymore.
"What a garbage ending anyway," she muttered, stuffing the book into a drawer.
"The protagonist actually chose Heroine Number Four? Absolute logic error."
She stared back at the screen. The curve remained steady.
But Lust's soul-fire never once relaxed.
☆☆☆
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