The Gamer Chapter 1155 – Monsters in an Iron Shell (Patreon)

“Jesus fucking Christ,” John muttered. His steps down the stairs accelerated from a casual walk to a sprint. The black obsidian led down into a massive underground chamber, older in its design than the fortress above, filled from wall to wall with pillars onto which people were chained. Worse than the shackles on arms and legs were the tubes that had been implanted into the lower spines of the people, siphoning mana out of badly healed wounds and up through winding hollow pipes towards a massive crystal at the centre. Primitive mana generators, as cruel as the rest of the Iron Domain, fuelling the shield generator.

Everything hung in these chains. Humans, beastkin, sapient creatures that left behind the basic humanoid form, and the occasional crystal of Ironborn that had fallen out of favour of the Emperor, all of them were confined. The people were too broken to even vocalize their anguish. On their faces sat the same masks, forcing them to breathe Mettle. There were corpses between the tortured, still hanging in their chains while slowly rotting away. Few of them had mustered the courage to bite off their tongues. Others had simply not received new Mettle, the little vial that slotted in at the side of their mask empty. They had been left to starve.

John stopped before one of them, raised his hand and froze. He wanted to take off the mask and unchain the person, someone he would basically have described as a werewolf, but didn’t know where to start. The mask was the only vitality they had going and the primitive arcano-tech that siphoned off their mana had long since been surrounded by scar tissue. Even if John did separate them cleanly, the spinal damage was likely so severe that they wouldn’t be able to feel their legs.

‘Undine, get down here, now,’ he sent out the call while stepping back. As much as he wanted to help here, this was not his speciality. What he could do, to start with, was end the siphoning of the sickly green mana engine. Curiosity drove him to ask himself why the mana changed colour that way. Humanity made him shove that question aside for another time.

Figuring the mana generator out was thankfully easy. It operated under the same fundamental principles as the ones they had back home. There were ways to create a mana vacuum, which, like all vacuums, would get filled by the laws of reality if the situation allowed it. Roughly speaking, there were two varieties of such siphons: the voluntary and the involuntary kind, characterized by whether or not the method could break through the basic barrier even the weakest Abyssals had between their mana pool and the outside world.

Understanding this meant that John only had to find the mana vacuum and separate it from the pipes. Easily done. Above the crystal, serving as the storage medium, all of the pipes bundled together before leading into it. Sending the Mandala Sphere up there, John just had to slice through them all twice, creating a wide enough gap that the mana vacuum was no longer connected to the sources. Volatile arcane energy still in the pipes unloaded in the air in a series of small explosions. It sounded like firecrackers were going off. To John, all of that was harmless, and eventually it ceased. Darkness descended on the room, while the green light ebbed away.

Furious, John headed back up the stairs. He had meant to search for any remaining Ironborn. Now that he had seen this, he would leave the remaining search and clean-up to his haremettes. The interrogation couldn’t wait any longer.

The already defeated Ironborn, a total of fifteen of them, were lined up against the wall in the courtyard. Nia and Gnome were watching over them, the former sealing magic and the latter keeping them immobile. The typical precaution of removing their limbs had been taken. When it came to the Archduchess and the Duke, however, their magical power was too much to think they were completely without movement options.

The moment John stepped into the courtyard, the mouth of the Archduchess opened wide and revealed a barrel at the back of her throat. A high-pressure stream of water shot out at impressive speed. John didn’t even bother reacting to it. Without effect, the attack broke on Particle Skin.

John stopped in front of the Archduchess and grabbed her by the skull. The water her hair had been made up off had been depleted in the fight with Metra, leaving her bald, aquamarine head. Her white eyes reflected with defiance. Her jaw snapped back shut into the shape of a regular human’s. Teeth aside, as her canines were sharp and curved, almost like the fangs of a snake. Looking at her closely, her entire body had a smooth, scaly feeling to it.

Interest in her species of aquatic humanoid was second to John’s rage, however. “Did you know what is going on in your basement?” he hissed, wanting to clear out the last vestiges of doubt.

“You mean the place where the Emperor will hang you, traitor?” Lethele giggled.

The Gamer extended his left arm backwards and charged up an Arc Lance. Desperate grunts and metal scratching over stone could be heard. Three seconds long, the Ironborn he aimed at attempted to wiggle out of their confinement, then the arcane spell was unleashed and tore a hole through their torso. The Lord collapsed. “That will be you if you answer my questions, Lethele,” the Gamer growled. “Quick, painless, a smooth departure from life.”

“Like I would negotiate with a fleshling,” the Archduchess mocked.

“…Nia, show her the alternative,” John said and pointed at the Ironborn Duke to Lethele’s left.

Wordlessly, the pariah walked up to the target and reached down. The Ironborn put on a brave front at first, but his detailed face soon twisted into a fearful expression. Wincing away as much he as could, the Duke leaned back. Contact was inevitable. Nia grabbed the skull of the Ironborn. Her pale hand contrasted with the black metal his head was laced with.

Silver lines spread out from Nia’s back to the tip of her fingers, like a rapidly expanding root network. The strangeness of her presence ramped up considerably, causing all Ironborn to shift away from her as much as they could. The Duke started to scream. Raw fear turned into pain and terror. His voice was twisted and interrupted, like a speaker connected via bad cable. The light in his eyes flickered on and off. Strange spasms wrecked his stillness and interrupted any attempt to get away.

After five minutes of agonizing, slow deletion, there was an audible crack inside the Duke’s chest and his body froze, suddenly turned into regular metal. Nia lifted her hand off the lifeless skull and directed the gaze of her blue eyes towards the Archduchess instead.

“Monster…” Lethele whispered.

“No,” Nia denied, staring down at her. “Effective towards your kind.” The pariah tilted her head, asking with a mild annoyance swinging in her voice, “If you did not wish torture to be used against you, why would you create a society like this? You have no grounds to deny whatever path I wish to use to extract information.” Reaching down at Lethele, Nia only stopped in her advance when John made a halting gesture.

The Gamer didn’t stop her for any humanitarian reasons. His rage hadn’t abated. With every facet he discovered of the Ironborn, he grew more convinced that looking at these people as ‘human’ was fundamentally a mistake. They had the shape and they had the origin. Beyond that, they were something different, alien and uncaring. John had yet to find an exception to this, which just spoke to the cruel effectiveness of their selection mechanism. To the Ironborn, anything but other Ironborn were the outgroup. No principles applied to them.

“Tell me about the communication system of the Iron Domain,” John demanded. “How do you exchange information?”

“We… write letters,” Lethele stated.

“Nia, remind her what’s in store for her if she doesn’t play along,” the Gamer told the blank.

Lethele screeched while Nia’s pariah aura expanded to the point that even John felt like the underside of his nails was itching. What was unpleasant to him, someone exposed daily to the pariah, was torture to the Ironborn who hadn’t even had a concept of an anti-magical existence previously. “I’m sorry! Stop it, stop it please!”

Nia and John exchanged a glance. In her gaze, the Gamer could see the same hardness as he felt at the moment. Behind that cute-loving veneer was a woman raised by the Horned Rat in the art of warfare. She knew how to learn what she needed to. Nodding slightly, the Gamer made her gradually decrease the terrorizing aura.

“You write letters and…?” the Gamer led her on.

“…Every major fort has magical communication lines, through which the Kings and the Emperor can see and hear.”

“Does that include this fortress?”

“Yes.”

“Where would this device be located?”

“In the tower my assailant destroyed.”

‘Metra, can you go digging for that?’ the Gamer asked.

‘Sure, not like we’ve found anything else that’s interesting,’ the First of Wrath responded. Keeping up through the eyes of the other elementals, John had seen them find a number of people dedicated to keeping the fortress pristine. Appearances were important to the Ironborn, if nothing else.

“Then I guess we can assume that the King of the west will come to investigate soon?” the Gamer asked.

“The King…? How would you not know your Queen Reetha lo Rust?”

“I’m not from this world,” John told her straight-up. Keeping the secret held no value anymore. “I’ve come from beyond the boundaries of this realm and I’ll upend it all to see your cruelty stopped. Now tell me about this Reetha. How much more powerful than you is she?”

“A cardinal monarch is to me what I am to a Lord.”

John raised an eyebrow. The level average of the Lords was 50, Lethele was level 264. Applying a five-fold gap properly, that would mean the Kings were well over level 1000. The more likely explanation was that the gap was considerable enough that Archdukes never considered they had a chance and Lethele was just saying this for the intimidation factor.

Something made more likely by what she added, “It would be wise of you to not kill me. Reetha values her subjects dearly. She’s a good monarch.”

John mockingly blew air out his nose. “You and I won’t see eye to eye on what a good monarch is. What are her powers?”

“I do not know,” Lethele responded. Hastily, before Nia could more than slightly raise her hand, she added, “Whenever Reetha fights, her opponents get so sloppy that she can take them out effortlessly. That is all I know, I swear!”

‘Some kind of illusion magic, maybe?’ the Gamer theorized. ‘Well, we’ll probably see soon. If the arrogance of the Ironborn goes even higher up the ranks, she will come to investigate to see what collapsed the tower. Even at top speed, we can expect her in a few hours at the earliest.’ “Alright, different question, what are the other notable forts? Give me the names of all of them.”

He expected a list of sixteen locations, four per kingdom in the Iron Domain. The actual list went to twenty-one. Although all of the names meant nothing to John, he didn’t even know what this fortress was called, he filed them away for later. They just had to find a more accurate map later on.

“Alright, next, tell me about the different monarchs,” he demanded.

There was a bit more information on the other three cardinal monarchs. The northern King was called Ronken of the Desert, a powerful light mage with a specialization in creating constructs from hardened light. Supposedly, he was the most powerful of the four.

To the south reigned Jevaine the Golden. The Queen had been assigned the southern areas for its wealth of metals, gold specifically, synergizing with her Innate Ability to convert value into temporary power. ‘Value’ was a bit nebulous for John, personally he found gold to be rather unimpressive compared to Abyssal metals. He just filed her under ‘situationally very powerful’ with the information he was given.

East was under the kingship of Severest the Quiet. A mute before transforming into an Ironborn, he either hadn’t learned how to speak or didn’t care to ever raise his voice in public. Ironically, his magic used sonic waves to inflict damage or distract his opponents. More than likely, he also had a general ability in wind magic.

Beyond those four, John also first heard about the Iron Maidens. Two women of a power equal or above that of the cardinal monarchs, serving directly under the Emperor. They hadn’t been seen fighting publicly in a while, so their abilities were even less known than those of Reetha. All that John could get out of Lethele was that one of the two had once been sent to quell a rebellion. The city had been annihilated in its entirety in a massive explosion.

The tale had been meant to intimidate the Gamer. As someone who could pull off the same feat with Arcana Strike, it only informed him that the Iron Maiden had a spell of immense destructive power. Depending on the condition, it wasn’t even required that her level was that high.

When it came to the Emperor, Lethele reported of his brilliance, about how her soul had been pulled out of her weak body and consolidated into a crystal. How he had then placed her in a new body and how she had then upgraded this body as she rose through the ranks. Aside from learning that he was (supposedly) truly immortal, there was nothing specific. The Emperor was unchallenged and asserted his authority by will alone.

What John most cared about in that tale was the overlap of hers with that of the others. The device was always described the same – a disk with a handle, only about the size of a dinner plate. The process, beyond gripping the handle, was a mystery to the Ironborn.

“Well, all of that was really interesting,” John commented when he felt he had extracted everything useful. “So, as per our bargain…” he placed his hand against her solar plexus, as the Arc Lance charged.

“Wait! You are dooming yourself! Killing me will-“

“I don’t care if it makes things harder for me,” John interrupted her. “I slay monsters, no matter what shell they have.” The Arc Lance fired. At point blank range, it was strong enough to pierce right through the core, even of the Archduchess. A short, metallic scream, then the body became rigid. John stood up and summarily executed the rest of them.

None of them deserved better.