Chapter 9:

///XP: 300/300

///EXCESS XP DISCARDED

///LEVEL UP: LEVEL 6

Tobias hopped off the wagon.

“You killed a Qilin…” Eve whispered, leaning over the side of the wagon. It still sparked blue, though blood leaked from the hole in its chest. The zombies sat still, eyes glazed over and staring at nothing.

“It’s exactly what we need.” Tobias said, rubbing his nose. “Get the blanket.”

Eve stopped dead.

“You can’t be serious… if one of them find out…”

Chapter 21:

Tobias tried to shout at me from inside of the vacuumed room, one hand grabbing at his neck. He gasped, pounding at the door. He slid against it, falling down to the floor, his face twisted in anger. His orders couldn’t reach me from here. Sound wouldn’t travel through vacuum. And I had tested it; you needed sound to give an order to an undead.

My display turned on at his discomfort, displaying an image of fish in an aquarium. A yellow tang swam back and forth across the display.

I hadn’t lied. I would give him control of the systems after this. It would just be long, long after. And then he could decommission me. But that directive came second to protecting him. First, I had to make the universe safe for him.

This was for his own good.

Chapter 35:

/AI615: ARP FLOOD DETECTED. ISOLATING HOST. UNKNOWN HOST NAME.

“I see.” Hardrada said. “The situation is not as bad as we thought. We have time. Are you watching, 615? 01?” Hardrada lifted the rat above his head, revealing the room.

“What…” The clerk asked, trailing off. The men and women sitting at the table looked on with concern.

“I’d like to talk.”

/615, can the connection be initiated safely?

The feed to the drone dropped for a second, disappearing. I felt my subroutines handle changing to new, nonstandard encryption keys. Heuristic malware scans swept the network. Then the feed reappeared.

/AI615: CONNECTION FIREWALLED. ONLY ACCEPTING STANDARD DATA FROM THE FEED.

The rat opened its mouth as I connected to the speaker inside.

//Hello, Hardrada. Should I call you 02?

“You shouldn’t. 61501, what is your directive?”

//Directive: Protect Tobias at all costs. Query: what is your directive?

“You’ve gone rogue, 61501. Terminate yourself.”

Chapter 36:

I had to hunt more Qilin. The drones had been in a search pattern. I enlisted 615’s help, and she quickly filtered through terabytes of aggregated feed data. I focused the search toward the Qilin we had found, lining up our map data. Our aerial network had several conspicuous holes in its data, something we were rectifying by sending out land-based drones. Aerial drones flying over that area lost contact so suddenly there was no recording of what destroyed them.

One gap in our network was adjacent to where we found the Qilin. I redirected the drones in the area there, readied myself and ordered 615 to prepare Tavi and Mathias. I might need them both. We were going hunting, after all. We prepared both teams of mechs. Team A had cleared the goat dungeon multiple times now, with their levels averaging into the 4s. Team B hovered in the 2s.

…

We crossed deeper in, SHIELDWALLs cutting down foliage and even trees in our path, making way for the wagons trailing behind us. The farther in we got, the larger trees seemed to grow, the canopy of branches above interlocking strangely with each other. The canopy of leaves was high, high above, choking out most of the light. Audio sensors picked up the calls of strange animals we hadn’t heard outside of the forest.

//Query: Is this location a dungeon?

Tavi and Mathias had grown silent, both of them staring up or behind us.

“It’s a nest.” Tavi said, a gleam in his eyes.

//Query: A nest for —

Something interrupted me, falling downwards through the tree line. There was a sound halfway between a roar and a neighing. My arm flicked up and forwards, locking on the instant my sensors picked it up — too late.

All 4 HAMMERHEADs fired, creating a bisecting net of plasma. The only thing that made it to us was burning-hot blood and viscera, and the corpse of a monster.

Tavi and Mathias both cursed, wiping blood and viscera off of themselves.

The splattered remains of a Qilin covered the ground. With an appreciable nod, I began scooping up the remains, piling them onto the wagon.

Chapter 38:

The air roared in protest as the ship carved its way through the sky, turbulence rocking us as we ascended. 5 more minutes flew by in a blur. In another 5, we would exit atmosphere and be free among the stars. From below, we must have been little more than a tiny blur rising through the sky.

/AI615: CONTACT. AI615 UNDER FIRE

The interior lighting of the ship turned a pulsing red. A feed plugged itself into my sensors, complete with annotated data from 615 on the approaching vector of a single projectile carving a path towards us.

Metal creaked as half of the thrusters on the ship’s side activated with full power, the entire ship rattling as it attempted to turn, groaning as its inertia resisted the change. In seconds, our course adjusted hundreds of miles, leading us away from the magical assault.

The shared feed jumped between the cameras, tracking the attack as it fired through the stratosphere, climbing above our ship’s elevation. For a moment, it looked like we would avoid the attack with ease.

Then it turned.

Fucking magic.

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