Chapter 32 - Research in the Dark

The trek back up and out of Piston Gorge demanded nine hours of continuous marching along the eastern slope.

They did not stop to hunt. They carried the four rucksacks packed to bursting with copper cores and refined brass ingots, keeping their eyes trained on the overhead girders and dry conduits, yet the valley remained quiet, ruled only by the rhythmic mechanical thrum of the giant pistons pounding in the depths of the steam fog.

By seven in the evening, infernal time, they reached the dry fissure in the Ash Wastes.

The subterranean redoubt sat precisely as they had left it: cold, dusted in a fine layer of volcanic grit, and shielded behind the three tiers of [Runic Containment Barrier] Dante had scribed prior to their departure.

They shrugged off the two packs holding one hundred and thirty pounds of metal at the back of the stone chamber, propping them against the iron chest.

Maria unclipped her webbing straps with an extended sigh, kneading her aching shoulders where the load had ground raw red welts beneath her brigandine.

"We aren't hauling this to market today," she warned, dropping onto the deflated air mattress. "I reek of spent grease and monster blood. If I have to barter with old Orom right now, I'll snap his counter in half on pure irritation."

Dante already had his right hand leveled in the center of the basalt cavern.

"We aren't selling a scrap today," he agreed, opening his interface's fourth tab. "The copper stays stashed here. We jump back to the apartment now, take a real shower, eat food that doesn't come out of a tin, and sleep in a clean bed."

Planar Transit: Initiate.

The crack of the dimensional vacuum swallowed both of them within the gray rock and spat them out two seconds later atop the felt rug of the Acacias living room.

The shift in atmosphere was jarring.

No trace of sulfur fumes or burnt motor oil lingered here. The air inside the penthouse was cool, carrying the scent of waxed hardwood floors and the fabric softener in the curtains that had hung drawn for two straight weeks. Beyond the balcony glass, the lights of the human metropolis glowed with tranquil steady warmth under the dark sky of a muggy Tuesday night.

Maria racked her forty-pound greatsword onto the wall mount with a heavy clatter of pure relief, kicked off her dirt-caked leather boots, and headed straight for the hallway bathroom.

She spent forty minutes under the hot electric shower.

The stream washed black down the drain for the first ten minutes, sluicing away the soot embedded in her pores, the machine grease caked under her nails, and the crust of dried blood from the grenade shrapnel on her thigh. When she finally stepped out wrapped in a thick white terrycloth bathrobe, her cropped damp hair dripping onto her shoulders, she looked like an entirely different person.

Dante took a quick shower in his ensuite, cleansing the graze along his left bicep with mild soap before dressing it in sterile pharmacy gauze and adhesive tape.

By nine-thirty that evening, both were seated at the dining table.

The table held fresh crusty rolls Dante had picked up from the corner bakery with the spare key, thick cuts of mild cheese, cooked ham, and a glass pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice Maria had pressed by hand.

They ate in total silence for the first fifteen minutes, answering an appetite no processed protein ration could ever satisfy.

When Maria pushed her empty plate aside and folded her heavy arms over the table, the question that had hung suspended on the crane gantry finally surfaced.

"You claimed that at Level 40 or 50 we could go toe-to-toe with that guy in the white jacket," she said, her voice devoid of its usual mocking bite.

Dante finished chewing his last bite of roll, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin.

"It's a working projection based on the scaling curves of Tier Three and Four classes," he began, gray eyes fixed on the grain of the table. "At Level 50, a caster commands over two thousand Mana points and wields terrain-rupturing spells. A Level 50 Sentinel possesses Strength above seventy and Constitution scraping eighty. A single swing of your sword would cleave a bridge pylon in two."

"You're out of your mind, Dante."

Dante frowned, looking up to meet her eyes.

"How so? The system operates on a fixed mathematical progression. Attributes climb in direct proportion to tier milestones."

"The interface system runs on that math," she tapped her forefinger on the table with a sharp rap. "That guy isn't playing by the rules of that interface."

She leaned forward, her brown eyes locking onto his.

"Think about it, bighead. Use that thirty-four-point brain to recall what you witnessed yourself. That man halted time when we were nine years old. He froze a droplet of juice in empty air. It wasn't a slow debuff or an ether ward, the world simply ceased moving."

She drew a sharp breath through her nose, the tension tightening her expression.

"And what did Miro say up on that crane? They took his entire family. Rounded up dozens of demon settlements and treated them like laboratory scraps to test soul matrix compatibilities. Miro had beast mandibles grafted onto his jaw and only survived on dumb luck. People who do that aren't garrison commanders you kill with two sword strokes to the back once you hit Level 50."

She paused for three seconds, letting her words settle with cold gravity.

"That man is on a completely different scale, Dante. Far beyond anything visible on this interface."

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Dante held his silence.

Maria's raw, unadorned logic struck dead center against his analytical mind. He was conditioned to interpret existence through the prism of the interface: gain levels, invest attributes, unlock skills, overcome the next obstacle.

Yet that entity bore no health bar over his head.

Whenever the man in the white jacket materialized in Maria's room or lounged on their bench press, Dante's interface generated zero combat telemetry. There was no estimated level, no text indicating Mana pools or structural weaknesses. He simply existed there, entirely outside the reach of any soul-scanning algorithm.

"Come with me," Dante said, rising abruptly and heading toward the home office where he kept the desktop rig used to manage their bank accounts and exchange spreadsheets.

Maria stood and followed him down the short corridor, pulling her bathrobe snug.

The office was a compact room lined with shelves of old general history encyclopedias and a dual-monitor workstation resting on a dark wood desk.

Dante pressed the tower's power button.

The displays illuminated with the quiet hum of the CPU fan, booting into the clean desktop of a standard operating system.

He dragged the swivel chair over, opened the web browser, and set his hands on the mechanical keyboard.

"What are you looking for?" Maria paused behind him, resting a heavy hand on the back of his chair.

"Everything," Dante replied, slender fingers already clacking across the keys.

He started with the exact phrases Miro had uttered atop the crane.

White jackets hell.

White clothed entities lower plane.

Soul experiments primordial matrix.

The search engine returned two hundred thousand results in under half a second.

Dante scanned through the first three pages of links.

Cold War conspiracy message boards, historical articles on nineteenth-century doctors in European mental asylums, department store sales on faux-leather jackets, and old UFO forums detailing glowing apparitions along rural American highways.

Nothing regarding Hell. Nothing about planar rifts or mutilated demon colonies in the Fourth Continent.

"Change the terms," Maria pointed at the search bar. "Look up what he called you that first night in the alley. The title the interface logged in the quest."

Dante cleared the input line with three taps of the backspace key.

He typed it out slowly, character by character:

Light Bearer.

He hit enter.

The screen populated the new query.

Dante knitted his brows, leaning close to the primary monitor.

The results were absurd.

Links to hardware distributors peddling rechargeable work lanterns with the slogan the true light-bearer for your job site, three astronomy blog posts on solar refraction through the atmosphere of Venus, and an archived local piece on a coastal lighthouse built in Bahia back in the seventies.

Not a single reference to ancient myth.

No religious texts citing fallen celestial beings, no historical compendiums detailing rebel angels, and not a trace of ancient names like Luci-

Whoa whoa, not here, that name cannot show up here. Change the channel, right now.

Snap of fingers.

It was a total blank.

"There's nothing," Dante murmured, taking his hand off the mouse.

"How can there be nothing?" Maria leaned over his shoulder, reading the sterile results. "Even my mom, who could barely read a newspaper, used to talk about angels and demons when I was little back in the slums."

"She spoke of generic parish prayers, Maria," Dante replied, swiveling his chair to face her. "She spoke of plaster saint statues and the sins of neighbors stealing chickens. But the technical concept, the title of a Light Bearer, does not exist here."

He gestured at the empty screen.

"And logically, it makes sense that it wouldn't. Earth is a blind world. People here are born, clock forty years in shoe stores or garment plants, pay income taxes, and die assuming the universe is nothing more than this ball of dirt and water spinning through the void. Why on earth would a higher authority running soul experiments across Hell leave a record of its existence floating on the open web of a developing nation?"

Maria didn't answer right away.

She stared at the blinking cursor in the empty search bar, her brown eyes narrowing with an instinct that owed nothing to algorithms or computer data.

"It doesn't make sense, Dante," she murmured, her voice steady. "The internet in this world has millions of pages on werewolf lore, hospital corridor ghosts, and flying saucers in the woods. Normal people spin stories about everything they can't explain. How is there not a single sentence about something that is demonstrably real, something branded into my vision in silver script since I was nine years old?"

She ran a hand through her damp hair, slowly shaking her head.

"It's not that people here never knew," she finished, looking straight into his gray eyes. "It feels like someone took an eraser and scrubbed every trace from this world's memory."

Dante held her gaze for several long seconds.

Maria's hypothesis was preposterous from the standpoint of human history and secular science. Yet coming from a girl who had watched time freeze solid and now wielded thirty-two Constitution inside a six-foot-three frame, the concept of planetary-scale censorship no longer seemed quite so far-fetched, even if wildly improbable.

He closed the browser with a click and shut down both monitors.

Gloom reclaimed the office.

"We aren't finding the answers on a desktop computer, Maria," Dante said, rising from the chair and smoothing his sleeve over the bandaged arm. "If that information exists anywhere, it's locked inside the central archives of the First Great Continent or the libraries of the deeper rings."

He stepped out into the hallway, pausing at his bedroom door.

"Get some sleep," Dante said, exhaustion finally settling behind his eyes. "First thing tomorrow, we jump back to the Wastes shelter, retrieve our copper haul, and head down to the Low Ember market. We have an armored train to catch and plenty of levels to grind before we try figuring out who really owns the board."

Maria glanced down the dim hallway, let out a slow breath, and gave a nod.

"Fair enough," she said, padding toward her room at the end of the hall. "Tomorrow old Orom is paying full price on every ounce of that clean metal without crying for a discount."

She stepped inside and clicked the door shut softly.

Dante entered his own room, laid back onto his spring mattress, and closed his eyes, feeling the basilisk bone plate resting cold and steady between his shoulder blades.

The silence of the Acacias penthouse was absolute, free of the ear-splitting roar of canyon pistons and the reek of sulfur in the air.

They had a plotted route, one hundred and thirty pounds of valuable metal cached across the dimensional divide, and one hundred and sixty-six days remaining on the interface timer to cross twenty-six hundred miles of iron to the heart of that subterranean empire.

Yet the question of who was truly pulling the strings of this board had just driven its roots deep into both their minds.