Chapter 612: Sub-Suppression Engine [Bonus - ]

Chapter 612: Sub-Suppression Engine [Bonus Chapter]

The sub-level chamber four thousand feet beneath the scorched bedrock of Iunu didn’t smell like the desert.

The chamber was immense, a hollowed-out dome of dark basalt spanning half a mile across, reinforced by tiered ribbing of dense star-iron that anchored directly into the continental crust.

Far above, the circular exhaust shaft plunged straight up into the lightless throat of the earth which an engineering marvel designed to expel millions of cubic meters of superheated atmospheric mana whenever the tectonic grids flared.

And in the center of the floor, casting long rhythmic bars of cold azure light across the stone flags, rose the machine.

It was colossal... the size of a four-story fortress.

Massive rings of polished white alloy and dark celestial quartz rotated in counter-balanced orbits, whispering against their magnetic housings with a sound like a distant turbine idling underwater.

Intricate circuits, etched in the Second King’s silver script, pulsed with calm steady respiration along the outer perimeter, projecting an iridescent honeycombed dome of pure mana that sealed the core from the regular world.

[Sub Mana-Suppression Engine: Northern Sector Anchor No. 4.]

Not many people knew, well unless you worked around here... One wouldn’t be able to know that this wasn’t the Main Suppression Engine, that one was much further down in the center of Khemet and very close to the Earth’s crust, however these Sub-Mana Suppression Engines mattered a lot too.

Outside the glowing perimeter of the barrier, twelve men were gathered around an overturned packing crate that had been converted into an impromptu card table.

Three of them sat on folding stools directly facing the blue glow with their unbuttoned service jackets revealing sweat-stained undershirts and their service khopeshes as well as sidearms leaning carelessly against the crates.

A battered brass radio sat on a toolbox, quietly playing a tinny rhythmic string melody from a local Iunu frequency.

"Pass the dried figs, Hamid," one of the men muttered, flicking a plastic playing card onto the scarred wood. "You’ve been hoarding the bag since the fourth watch..."

"Eat your own rations, Farid," the man named Hamid grunted, his bronze skin shining with a sheen of grease under the work lamps. "My wife packed these with honey... If I give them to you, you’ll just choke on the seeds and blame the air scrubbers."

Laughter rippled through the group.

"Speaking of wives," a younger sentinel leaned back, his hands folded behind his head as he grinned toward the empty bunk area near the perimeter wall. "Has anyone heard from Nabil? He took the three-day pass up to the surface yesterday morning... That boy was shaking so hard when he clocked out, I thought his mana core was misfiring."

"First baby," an older, scarred veteran chuckled, pouring dark amber spirit from a ceramic flask into a tin cup. "The first one turns every proud desert warrior into a whimpering puppy, just give him forty-eight hours of changing soiled linen and hearing the infant screech at sunrise, and he’ll be begging the captain to send him back down here to scrub turbine intake vents..."

"He’s a good man," Farid smiled, leaning forward to claim the card trick. "I left two bottles of aged palm wine in his locker before he took the lift... He’s going to need the sleep."

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The bedrock violently shuddered.

The entire half-mile dome groaned as if a colossal fist had struck the stone miles above, raining a fine powdery blizzard of pulverized rock and ancient dust down upon the metal ribbing.

The lights strung along the catwalks flickered violently, cutting out for two seconds before the secondary batteries hissed and clicked back on with a sickly amber dimness as the tin cup spilled across the wooden crate, dark liquor soaking into the face-down cards.

The twelve men were on their feet in a fraction of a second, but their movements lacked the sharp manic terror of soldiers on a battlefield... it was the slow confused irritation of men whose quiet shift had been interrupted.

"What in the hell was that?" Farid frowned, squinting up into the gloom of the exhaust shaft where dust still drifted through the work-lamp beams. "Did the high-altitude line drop a freight container over the Citadel again?"

Standing near the perimeter console, a young man who had arrived only three days prior on an exchange detail stood completely rigid.

His uniform was different from the loose, embroidered linens of the Khemet guard... his tunic was stiff, slate-gray wool, carrying the double-eagle crest of the Europa Directorate’s Continental Watch.

His hand was clamped over the butt of his standard-issue carbine, his pale face turned up toward the dark ceiling with dilated pupils.

"What are you doing?!" the Europa substitute shouted, his voice cracking slightly with high-pitched nervous alarm. "Why are you looking at the cards?! That was a high-order detonation! Where is the rest of the battalion?! Where are the reserve squads?!"

Hamid looked at the boy, let out a short sigh, and casually picked up his spilled cup, shaking the excess droplets onto the flags.

"Take a breath, kid," Hamid said, his voice flat and condescending. "You came down on the transfer from Sector Three three days ago, right? You northern boys are always wound tighter than a cheap crossbow..."

"I asked where the rest of the station complement is!" the substitute pressed, stepping toward the table with his knuckles whitening on his sling. "The roster logged thirty-four men on active roster for this quadrant! There are twelve of us here! Where is the Station Director?!"

"Gone to the city," Farid answered, leaning against his chair and rolling his eyes. "Along with twenty other men... In case nobody briefed you before you boarded the transport, the Grand Sun Festival of Iunu kicks off in forty-eight hours, the entire city is flooded with millions of tourists, trade delegates, and street markets... The Director’s brother owns three silk pavilions in the outer plaza so he took early leave to manage the inventory."

The Europa substitute stared at them, his jaw literally slacking.

"He... he left? The Manager of a Sub-Suppression Engine abandoned his post for a market stall?!"

"Don’t look at us like we committed treason, boy," the scarred veteran scoffed, wiping dust from his collar. "This engine has sat in this exact basalt ring since the era of the Second King... The Apocalypse came and went, the rifts were sealed, and this machine hasn’t blinked once. You think a beast is going to buy a tourist ticket, take the public elevator down through four thousand feet of reinforced rock, and ask us for directions?"

"It’s... it’s gross negligence!" the substitute gasped, his chest heaving as he looked between the indifferent laughing vanguards. "The Suppression Engines are the single most valuable technological installations in human civilization... Even the Sub-suppression Engines. They are the only reason higher-tier horrors and abominations can’t manifest directly into the waking world and you’re sitting here playing cards and drinking palm wine while the surface shakes?!"

"Come drink, kid," Hamid chuckled, shaking his head and holding out the flask. "Seriously. You’re giving yourself an ulcer over nothing... Look at where you are. To get to this chamber, you have to enter the High Citadel, clear the Guard checkpoints, take the primary lift that requires an Al-Mansur blood-seal, and descend through four miles of solid bedrock. Look at the monitors."

Hamid walked over to the auxiliary security console, tapping a scarred finger against the cracked glass slate.

HUM!

A flickering three-dimensional green hologram sputtered to life, displaying the main corridor that descended from the heart of the palace above.

The image was static, showing the massive seven-foot-thick vault doors of solid star-iron sealed tight with the locking bolts engaged.

"See?" Hamid smirked, tapping the boy’s breastplate with the back of his hand. "The entrance is completely closed off and the seal is green too. Nothing moves through the tube unless the Pharaoh-President himself authorizes the current... So unless your imaginary terrorist can turn into a ghost and slip through four thousand feet of solid basalt, nobody is getting down here."

"And what if they don’t use the primary tube?!" the substitute demanded, pointing an accusatory finger toward the dark unmapped cavern mouths that ringed the outer circumference of the dome. "What about the natural fissures? The drainage ducts?!"

Farid took a long noisy swig from his cup, letting out a satisfied smack of his lips.

"Those drainage tunnels?" Farid laughed. "Kid, half of those fissures drop into blind magma pockets that haven’t been mapped since the Second Era and the other half? They are wired with the old defensive runes the World Kings laid down during the cleansing... High-power Destruction mana. The moment any foreign entity sets foot in those ducts, their flesh doesn’t even have time to burn as their atomic bonds get eviscerated into cold grease before they can take two steps... So unless your intruder is some kind of ancient invincible god that can somehow resist destructio—"

CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRACK!

The four-foot-thick basalt slab sixty feet directly above the card table violently imploded downward in a detonation of shattered granite, flying shale, and choking black dust.

THUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

The impact of the landing shook the entire chamber with such terrifying violence that the wooden crate exploded into kindling, sending playing cards, cups, and liquor bottles spinning into the dark!

The twelve men were thrown backward onto their shoulders, scrambling frantically across the flagstones, their eyes burning with the thick black grit that billowed through the air like a sudden smoke grenade.

"WEAPONS!" Hamid roared, rolling onto his knees with his service khopesh clearing its scabbard with a sharp ringing shing. "FORM ON ME! RAISE THE SOLAR—"

The words froze in his throat as the dust began to settle beneath the flickering work-lamps.

Standing in the center of a five-foot-deep impact crater was the silhouette of a woman.

Her tailored charcoal trousers and silk blouse were torn at the sleeves, coated in fine lightless black soot.

Long vibrant purple hair fell around her shoulders, thrashing gently as if an invisible storm were circulating beneath her skin as she slowly rolled her shoulders back, her neck tilting to the left with three sharp wet clicks of bone adjusting to gravity.

She shook her wrists, letting the fine black silt flow from her fingertips like liquid ink.

"Intruder!" Farid screamed, leveling his sidearm with shaking hands. "Halt! Keep your hands where we can see them! Who are you?! How did you bypass the upper shaft?!"

The woman slowly turned her head and the guards drew sharp collective breaths.

Her face was that of a young noble woman, perhaps an heiress or a high-ranking merchant’s daughter from the northern sectors but her eyes...

There was no human pupil.

Her eyes were burning with a radioactive emerald-green fire, veined with spinning complex golden runes that rotated in opposite directions around the optical center, radiating an aura of crushing arrogance that made the air in the chamber feel heavy, like wet cement filling their lungs.

A voice broke from the woman’s throat.

"A ’who’?" the entity murmured, Harper’s physical lips curling into a wide smirk. "How wonderfully quaint and first of all... I am a He."

Ititius flexed Harper’s fingers, stepping lightly out of the crater with his boots clicking rhythmically against the stone.

"I must say," Ititius purred, looking at his palms with admiration, "the descent was remarkably stimulating but after spending so long locked inside that dark narrow little scabbard... my newly reclaimed limbs feel slightly stiff. I believe a brief... physical calibration is in order."

He dropped his center of gravity, assuming an ancient low-slung northern dueling stance that looked scary on Harper’s slender frame.

"Now then, ambitious little guardsmen," Ititius smiled, his green eyes flaring with sadistic light. "Do try to die entertainingly."

"OPEN FIRE!" Hamid bellowed.

BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-CLANG!

The Europa substitute and four Khemet vanguards opened fire simultaneously!

High-velocity slugs and pressurized solar-plasma bolts tore through the sixty-foot gap, converging on Harper’s chest in a crisscrossing web of energy but Ititius didn’t blink.

SWOOSH!

Harper’s physical body seemed to bend at an unnatural, ninety-degree angle at the hips, swaying through the incoming line of fire with the sickening fluid grace of a cobra dancing through rain.

A kinetic slug grazed the fabric of her coat, a plasma bolt scorched the air half an inch above her ear and in the exact second the barrage ended...

BOOM!

The flagstone beneath Harper’s left boot shattered as she closed the thirty-foot gap in zero seconds, appearing directly inside Hamid’s guard.

Hamid’s Third Stage instincts fired in blind reflex as he dropped his shoulder, bringing his heavy bronze khopesh up in an explosive rising diagonal parry designed to sever the girl’s outstretched forearm.

"Die, bitch—" Hamid snarled!

CLANG-SHRRRK!

Harper’s bare right palm snapped forward, the fingers coated in an ultra-thin film of pressurized black sand as she caught the side of the bronze blade with her fingertips, twisting her wrist inward with terrifying torque.

CRACK!

The reinforced bronze khopesh snapped clean in two like dried kindling and Hamid’s eyes widened in horror as the momentum pulled his chest forward.

"Your form is atrocious," Ititius whispered softly into his ear. "A common soldier relying on heavy metal... How thoroughly disappointing."

SPLAT!

Harper’s bare left palm slammed flat against Hamid’s solar plexus.

A concentrated pulse of black sand shot directly from her skin, boring through his leather gambeson, entering his chest cavity, and violently expanding.

CRACKLE!

Hamid didn’t even have time to scream.

The light in his eyes died instantly as his skin, his armor, his blood, and his screaming mouth turned into an oily lightless statue of pure black glass.

TAP!

Ititius flicked the statue with a single fingernail.

SHATTER!

Hamid exploded into a million drifting black shards that scattered across the flagstones!

"HAMID!" Farid screamed, his mind snapping under the sudden horror.

He threw his sidearm aside with his hands blurring through complex hand seals as his core flared with desperate bright crimson fire mana.

"SOLAR PIERCE!"

FWOOOOOOOM!