Free Web NovelChapter 95: [95] Preparing the Defense, The Archives of Eternity
The edge of the Frontier was a desolate, silent wasteland. It was the absolute border between the managed reality of the Omniverse and the wild, untamed Primordial Chaos.
There were no stars here. There was only a sprawling, endless plain of grey dust and a massive, towering structure that defied standard architecture.
The Archives of Eternity looked like a billion bookshelves violently smashed together into the shape of a gothic cathedral. It stretched infinitely upward, lost in the dark fog. The building radiated a heavy, suppressive aura that made it hard to even formulate a thought.
Arthur Sterling, Cassia, and Vane stood a hundred yards from the massive iron entrance doors.
"This place is completely off the grid," Cassia whispered. She was back in her sleek, dark stealth armor, her sniper rifle secured tightly to her back. "The Prime Auditors use this facility to store physical backups of the cosmic ledgers. Stuff they don’t want floating around the digital network."
"If it’s so important, where are the guards?" Vane grunted. He had his heavy broadsword drawn, his eyes scanning the empty grey plains.
"They don’t use Enforcers here," Cassia explained, her voice dropping even lower. "They use Silence Wraiths. Conceptual entities designed to protect information. If you make a sound louder than a whisper, they find you. And they don’t fight you. They just delete your ability to make noise. Permanently. Including your heartbeat."
Arthur looked at the towering structure. He didn’t care about ghosts. He cared about the data.
"We go in quiet," Arthur commanded. "Vane, you are the meat shield. If a Wraith spots us, you take the hit. Do not swing that heavy piece of scrap metal. Just absorb it. Cassia, you find the terminal. Get me the dirt on the Prime Auditors."
"And what are you doing?" Vane asked bitterly.
"I’m the search engine," Arthur replied.
They moved out.
Arthur led the way, his steps perfectly measured to avoid making the slightest crunch against the grey dust. He pushed open the massive iron doors. They didn’t creak. They swung inward on completely frictionless hinges, revealing the interior.
It was breathtakingly massive.
Millions of towering wooden bookshelves stretched endlessly in every direction. The air was thick with the smell of old parchment and ozone. Floating between the aisles were rivers of glowing blue data streams, acting as the catalog system for the infinite library.
It was dead silent. The kind of silence that made your ears ring.
They moved into the labyrinth. Cassia took the lead, her rogue skills allowing her to navigate the complex maze of shelves with flawless efficiency. She communicated entirely through hand signals, directing them down winding corridors of ancient cosmic tax codes and planetary liquidation records.
Suddenly, Cassia threw a fist up. Stop.
Arthur and Vane froze instantly.
Drifting out from an aisle twenty feet ahead was a Silence Wraith. It didn’t have legs. It was a floating, tattered grey cloak with a featureless white mask for a face. Where its mouth should have been, there was just a gaping, sewn-shut hole.
It didn’t radiate heat or cold. It radiated absence.
Arthur watched it carefully. The entity was scanning the area, its head twitching in jerky, unnatural motions.
Vane shifted his weight slightly. His heavy armored boot scraped against the stone floor.
"Scriiiip."
It was a tiny noise. Barely a whisper. But in the Archives, it sounded like a gunshot.
The Silence Wraith snapped its masked face directly toward them.
It didn’t roar. It didn’t charge. It simply vanished and instantly reappeared directly in front of Vane.
The Wraith raised a long, skeletal finger, aiming right for the center of Vane’s chest. The air around the finger warped, completely devoid of sound. It was trying to delete the noise of Vane’s beating heart.
Vane didn’t swing his sword. He followed Arthur’s orders. He dropped his shoulder and stepped directly into the attack, using his raw, protagonist durability to tank the conceptual strike.
The Wraith’s finger struck Vane’s armor.
Vane’s eyes bulged. He didn’t make a sound, but his face twisted in absolute agony. The armor didn’t break, but the kinetic force of the silence crashed into his chest, violently restricting his lungs. He was suffocating.
Cassia moved like a blur. She didn’t use her guns. She drew a Stardusk dagger, coated the blade in her stealth aura to muffle the impact, and drove it directly into the side of the Wraith’s white mask.
"Squelch."
The dagger sank deep. The Wraith shuddered silently and dissolved into a pile of grey ash.
Vane dropped to his knees, gasping desperately for air. The sound of his heavy breathing was deafening in the quiet aisle.
"Get up," Arthur whispered harshly, pulling Vane to his feet by the collar. "We don’t have time to rest. That ash is going to alert the others."
Cassia pointed down the hall. "The central terminal is right there."
At the end of the aisle stood a massive, glowing pedestal made of polished obsidian. It was surrounded by a floating ring of encrypted data screens.
They rushed to the terminal. Cassia immediately went to work. Her hands flew across the holographic interface, her fingers moving so fast they blurred.
"The encryption is insane," Cassia muttered, sweat beading on her forehead. "It’s a Prime-level lock. I can bypass the outer shell, but searching through trillions of files manually will take years."
Arthur looked at the blinking red numbers in the corner of his vision.
[Current Debt: 849,999,999,940 Merit Points.]
[Multiplier restriction: 2x active for 10 seconds per day.] frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
He had been saving this. He only had ten seconds of system-backed power. If he used it now, he would be completely vulnerable during the trial. But without the evidence, the trial didn’t matter anyway.
"Step aside," Arthur ordered.
Cassia stepped back, making room for him at the terminal.
Arthur placed his hands flat on the glowing obsidian. He didn’t know how to hack. He didn’t know the coding language of the Celestial Court. But he didn’t need to. He was going to brute-force the search algorithm with raw, terrifying processing power. freёwebnovel.com
"System," Arthur commanded in his mind. "Activate the 2x multiplier. Apply it entirely to cognitive processing and data assimilation."
[Ding!]
[2x Multiplier Activated.]
[Duration: 10 Seconds.]
The world instantly slowed down.
Arthur’s brain exploded with hyper-accelerated perception. The glowing data streams flowing around the terminal didn’t look like a blur anymore. He could see every single 1 and 0. He could read the transactional history of entire galaxies in a fraction of a millisecond.
Nine seconds.
He pushed his awareness deep into the Archives’ network. He bypassed the public ledgers. He ignored the planetary tax reports. He hunted for the hidden files, the redacted accounts belonging to the Prime Auditors.
