B2-34 - Watering Hole (Patreon)

“I must say that’s the most insane thing you’ve said in the last few months,” Bell said. “I thought you had gotten better in your decision making.”

“What’s insane about heading toward the mana bloom while scores of high leveled rogue AIs are flapping, crawling, rolling, and skipping their way toward the only mana source that exists?” Maya asked.

“All of it.”

Maya chuckled as she looked toward the west. “There’s mana in that direction. We need mana. We need it to survive and we need to know if we can take some of that mana back with us, inside the black goo or batteries.”

“It’s still an insane attempt,” Bell said.

“Well, we can just take a gander at what’s up over there, then. We mosey on over, have a look-see, then skedaddle if the shit hits the fan, alright?”

“Half of what you just said doesn’t make any sense,” Bell said.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Maya grinned.

“We don’t have anything to travel the distance, anyway,” Bell added. “The rover runs off of mana.”

“We still have your trike,” Maya replied. “It’s been sitting in storage for months now, just waiting for the right moment to come out and save us.”

“It has no will of its own. It is a mechanical machine,” Bell stated.

“I suppose I am staying?” Yosi asked.

“Sorry, gal, you pulled the short straw. Plus Bell is the only one that can pedal that trike of his. Also Badblood needs someone to watch over her. We shouldn’t be gone that long, although…” Maya looked at the distant light, “I have no idea how far it is.”

“On this terrain I can pedal up to twenty kilometers an hour, up to six hours before I have to rest.”

‘Okay, that’s about a hundred and twenty kilometers, if it’s farther than that, we’ll just come back. At a minimum of a standard day.”

***

Maya couldn’t stop grinning as she and the others quickly set up cabling to power the lights in the mess hall. Junior and his vats of clones were a needy bunch, in addition Yosi required access to her computer along with the tablet that ran the rogue AI drones.

She spent a few hours working on other things she might need, as there was no mana to activate the turrets she disabled a few of them and loaded up on the pulse mines she had created. They after all were going where the rogue AIs were headed and she knew how easily their luck could turn. After a few more hours of preparing they were ready to leave.

“Stay safe, Yosi. We’ll be back with a tale to tell and hopefully a source of mana,” Maya paused and crouched before the woman, smiling at her. “A Sullivan must always be at Winterfell. If things go sideways, you have all the supplies and extras. Find Whiteclaw and her crew if we don’t come back.”

“You’ll come back,” Yosi said. “I shall protect Badblood and secure the Hanganathorie.”

“We’re off then, see you in a day or so.” Maya waved and then headed down through the dark ship and out into the dark world beyond.

***

Maya wasn’t afraid of the dark, but she found herself shivering slightly as they made their way across the lightless landscape. The sensor box mounted on the front of the trike was their only source of sight, a weak burst scan creating a wireframe image of everything before them for nearly half a kilometer.

They traveled in silence, the darkness around them was a suffocating weight, extinguishing all words and idle chatter. Bell continued methodically pedaling with his large upper arms, while Maya stood behind him in the small cargo area, trying to spot anything that was either danger or of interest.

They came across their first find two hours after leaving the Hangy. A body of an ant lay before her, one of the creatures that had been attacking the Hangy not so long ago. There was no damage to the metallic shell of the creature.

Maya walked up to the body. She heaved it over onto it’s back and saw that it was whole and hale. “Think it’s mana was purged?” she asked.

“Most likely. Perhaps due to it’s small stature and relative weakness, its black goo wasn’t enough to sustain it.” Bell replied.

Maya nodded. She adjusted the sensor box’s range and sent out a larger burst. Immediately it responded with dozens, then scores of hits. They were at the edge of a field of dead ants, hundreds lay motionless in the dirt, lying where they had run out of mana.

“If mana returns, they’ll all wake the fuck back up,” Maya said.

“Indeed.”

“Feel like taking a break from all that pedaling?” Maya grinned.

***

Maya sat down heavily and drained a bottle of water. She was sweating in her armor and gasping for air. Even with her improved Physical stats, she felt the burn in her arms and ache in her hands. A few minutes of chopping had turned into two hours of rushing about decapitating as many of the ants as possible.

It wasn’t just the fact that the ants would awaken if mana returned, but after Maya had decapitated the first ant, she had run a quick scan of its head. Within it lay a complete rogue AI processor, low-grade, but with enough computational power to create more drones.

Brain power was a resource they were running low on. They had the processors they had purchased from Haltor’s World, but most of that was tied up in creating sensor boxes for the turrets, and their last trip hadn’t netted them much besides a few additional ones. Tender on the other hand was well versed in creating bodies from the rogue AI manufacturer that Maya was still trying to figure out how to use.

The ants low grade cores could be wiped, a process they had learned when making the scout rats, and reprogrammed to do all kinds of things. With an entire field of hundreds of ants, Maya indulged in the free resources.

Bell sat down heavily beside her, he pulled off his helmet and let out a grunt of breath. “This is more work than I thought it would be.”

“Yeah, totally. I’ve got two hundred and twenty heads, how about you?”

“Two hundred and thirty nine,” he said.

“How? I’m stronger than you?”

“Not faster though.”

Maya chuckled. “It would be far better just to wipe their processors and dump a new program into them, but that would take about half an hour for each ant,” she said. “If we did it that way, we could have kept them whole, allowing us to use them as they are.”

“We can always come back for the bodies,” Bell said. “If they aren’t harvested and recycled by other rogue AIs.”

“Yeah.”

It had been entirely the smaller ants that had succumb to the mana purge, Maya hadn’t seen the larger beetles or even the bigger artillery bugs. There was also the absence of the smaller, nimbler ants she had seen in the fighting. It was possible that they were a higher grade than the regular ants, with access to better refined black goo.

“No rest for the wicked, Bell,” Maya said groaning as she got to her feet. “I want a thousand ant heads by morning!”

***

“Jesus, it’s a watering hole of death,” Maya gasped.

“That’s what you’re focusing on?” Bell said. “Not the massive glowing lake of mana before us?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty cool too, but look at that.” Maya gestured toward a massive crab like rogue AI battling a T-rex looking rogue AI. They were tussling at the edge of a massive glowing pool of light, miles across and stretching far into the horizon.

They had reached the edge of the trash piles, where the endless plains that Maya had first arrived began. Instead of the flat plains, they were greeted with what appeared to be a glowing sea.

Bell had nearly crapped his pants as they paused at the last trash pile to ascend its peak. From the top they could see the near endless expanse of the glowing sea of liquid, the only liquid Maya had ever seen naturally in the rainbow sky hellscape. It, of course, was not liquid. Bell had marveled at it and through some stuttering and shocked expressions, claimed it was liquid mana.

It was as liquid as the black goo or even mercury, in that it wasn’t liquid at all. Instead it was mana so concentrated that it went beyond the solid that were mana stones and became a liquid.

“It isn’t just concentrated mana,” Bell said, practically drooling at the sight before him. “It’s the purest form of mana that’s only been created in labs or by high tiered SIL, and then in only small amounts. A single liter of this could power the Cage for days. This entire lake… it could power an entire galaxy for years.”

“So a lot of mana,” Maya said nonchalantly.

“That doesn’t even begin to describe it. At this concentration, in this amount, it can warp reality, it can turn those weak rogue AIs into full fledge monsters. It can be used to create the most amazing enchantments and devices that have rarely been seen in the multiverse.”

“Yeah, we’re totally going to have to get our hands on this,” Maya said. Bell nodded in agreement. “There’s a ton of liquid mana there for everyone, why are they fighting over it?”

“They’re rogue AIs, they fight for everything,” Bell replied.

Maya thought over his words and shook her head. One would imagine that artificial intelligences would be logical and calculating in the extreme, but from her experiences they were more animal like in their thinking. Mana harvesting being the top priority of their existence.

From the trash pile where Bell and she sat, they watched as hordes of rogue AIs surged and fought one another in pitched battles that ranged from one on one to a hundred to one.

They didn’t need their sensor box to see, instead the entire area was lit up with mana bloom, the interaction between various natural elements and high concentrations of mana. There was so much mana in the air that Maya could feel it tingling on her skin, enough that Bell had said the black goo packs they were carrying to power their computers were recharging faster than before.

“What I’m pretty curious about,” Maya said, chewing on a ration bar, “is that this was a flat plain and now it’s a lake. This entire plane of existence is one flat plain, no hills besides the trash piles. Where did the lake come from?”

“You said you traveled through here, perhaps its the place where this lake forms every time the System does maintenance. You said nothing existed out here, perhaps this is why.”

“Good point,” Maya said finishing her bar. “Well, let’s go see if we can collect some mana.”

***

“The trick of being sneaky is not to be seen,” Maya said, pulling out a device from her inventory. She had cleaned out her inventory before their scouting mission and in doing so had discovered some of the items she had forgotten she had packed away long ago.

One being the cloaking device that was harvested from a rogue AI long ago. The last time they had used it was when Shen had said hello by cutting a hole into the Hangy and sending in his zombies to fight and capture them.

It produced a small cloaking field and was a huge power consumer, but with the heavy ambient mana this close to the lake, their black goo packs were being overcharged. It was a two kilometer trek across the empty gray plain to reach the nearest edge of the lake, but that area was being patrolled and fought over by a group of spider-rhinos and condor-hydras that constantly clashed while trying to sup from the waters of life.

Maya didn’t fully understand what liquid mana was, for her it was just concentrated mana, but Bell seemed to be drooling at the sight of it. She began to fully realize what it meant when she watched a beaten and battered rogue AI drag itself into the mana pool and then a few minutes later, surge back out gleaming with power and completely healed.

There was a lot of fighting going on around the edge of the lake, but Maya saw that there wasn’t a lot of dying going on. The torn, shredded, and battered rogue AIs would limp to the lake and then replenish themselves, then go back to fighting once more.

“I don’t think they’re fighting for control over the lake or just to fight. Most of these rogue AIs have some sort of special attack, like Big Snake. I don’t see anyone using them,” Maya said. “They’re leveling and evolving.”

She watched as a rogue AI emerged from the waters bigger and stronger than before, returning to a fight with its former combatant and dominating them in moments. The loser crawled its broken way back to the pool and the process started all over again.

Bell frowned and they continued watching for a while longer. “You’re right. They are evolving. Just what we need.”

“We do this quick and fast, don’t let them see us and don’t let them touch us.”

Maya had emptied an entire vat of black goo, acquiring nearly 5Mg of mana which she divided up into twenty-five kilogram jerry cans of black goo. She had taken the time and a little bit of mana to create straps for the cans, turning them into backpacks. She had ten packs in all, with enough mana to get them to their destination and back again.

Things had changed as Maya wasn’t just wanting to fill the black goo pack with ambient mana, she wanted to take some of the liquid with her. She dumped out a can of black goo, grimacing at the waste and prepared herself for the charge forward.

Bell warned that such a mana concentration, the liquid mana would outright kill them if they touched it. When liquid mana was created, it was a dangerous thing, with a lot of safety precaution and delicate procedures to handle it. They had none of that here. Liquid mana should not exist in this form, it would have dissipated long ago, but instead the lake seemed stable.

They waited for nearly four hours before making their move. The fighting and evolving of the rogue AIs ebbed and flowed with time, at moments there was a constant brutal battle going on and other times, there was peace and tranquility as all opponents were too battered to keep fighting. Maya watched as smaller rogue AIs, probably decent leveled but not geared to brawling, snuck in and grabbed to go boxes of the mana juice. That sight had formed Maya’s own plan, if the little rogue AIs could snatch up some and scurry away, she could too.

The fighting came to a stop as two massive rogue AIs beat the ever living hell out of one another and both collapsed far from the shore of the lake. They had claimed a large area, nearly half a kilometer wide and any who trespassed was immediately stomped to death.

Rogue AI BV5472EW - Level 60

Rogue AI GI72143AA - Level 62

The two titans rumbled and groaned as they tried moving their battered bodies toward the lake. Maya tapped Bell on the shoulder and they began hustling forward. The other rogue AIs were too occupied with their own fights or still fearful of the two that they hadn’t moved onto the spot yet.

Maya’s heart hammered in her chest as she made a slight detour around the collapsed rogue AIs. She could almost feel their red eyes tracking her; the cloaking field had come off a low leveled rogue AI and she wasn’t entirely sure it would work against the bigger high leveled AIs.

They skidded to a stop before the edge of the lake, Maya gasped, not from exertion, but from the sheer amount of mana that was pummeling her. It felt physical, like a body-sized fist slamming into her soul repeatedly. She slid the metal pack of her back and tossed it into the liquid, careful not to let any touch her.

The glug-glug noise of the liquid mana filling the metal can nearly made her laugh hysterically. It took many painful breaths for the can to fill and Maya reeled back her catch.

“Shit,” she cursed when she looked at the can. The liquid mana had easily run off the metal, but the straps she had made here of duracloth and they were soaked through with mana. The cloth straps nearly glowed with the amount of mana in it.

“Just inventory it,” Bell said.

Maya touched a spot on the can and willed it into her inventory. It didn’t budge.

“No go,” Maya said. “I think it can’t be inventoried.”

Maya pulled out her axe and sliced away the straps, working fast. All that remained was the boxy metal can and she hefted it under one arm and turned to flee.

They came face to face with another rogue AI.

Rogue AI FN5578TZ - Level 69

It was a centaur like creature, six legged and a humanoid torso that was covered in metallic tentacles. It lacked a head, instead it had a singular red eye within the center of its chest.

Bell and Maya didn’t hesitate, Maya swung her axe and threw it right for the red eye, it was followed closely by Bell’s own throwing weapon It seemed the rogue AI was as shocked as they were at seeing one another, it paused in its rush for the lake and it gave them the second they needed to attack.

The rogue AI let out a screech, deathly loud in the relative silence of the area they were in. Maya’s axe embedded itself into the red eye, but it didn’t destroy it. Bell’s aim was slightly off and chipped against the remaining lens before bouncing away. A tentacle pulled the axe out and Maya could see the cracked and broken outer casing of the red eye.

She tossed Bell the can. “Run.”

“What are-“

“Run!”

Bell didn’t say anything, instead fleeing beyond the stunned rogue AI and into the mana bloom lit world.

Maya didn’t waste anytime. She summoned a mana pulse mine, activated it and then threw it at the rogue AI before her. The burst of mana from the device was far stronger than she realized, shoving the massive rogue AI back and nearly throwing her into the mana lake.

She scrambled back to her feet and summoned the black goo netting she had carried before, then threw it into the mana lake. From it extended a long power cord, which she made use of by summoning a railgun turret. It was the heavier version that she had created to defend the Hangy. While it hadn’t been used that much in the fight against the swarm, Maya knew its worth.

The rogue AI recovered from the mine and seemed pissed. It roared and charged at her, but Maya had the turret up and running in seconds. She grinned as she saw the power output, far beyond what the black goo netting should have had. Liquid mana was saturating the black goo and from it power surged into the railgun, there was an almost unlimited amount of mana to draw upon.

The railgun cracked and there was a audible ping as the marsani slug slammed into the centaur rogue AI. She saw the metal of its chest dent, but not penetrate.  The railgun spat another round and another, forcing the rogue AI back, but the slugs weren’t piercing its armored form.

Maya cursed and then summoned another railgun turret from her inventory. She connected it to the power source and it came to life, firing beside its companion. She then pulled the last railgun out and connected it.

Their fight went unnoticed as the other rogue AIs in the area were battling one another, but that didn’t last long. The three turrets combined slammed slugs into the centaur, Maya overriding some of the safety protocols to dump more power into the weapon. The black goo netting was sucking up mana faster than the three turrets could use it.

Rogue AI FN5578TZ - Level 69

Defeated

+ 100 QNXP gained

Lootable

As the centaur died, the turrets automatically turned and began firing upon the two damaged rogue AIs that had been watching the fight. Maya cursed.

Rogue AI BV5472EW - Level 60

Defeated

+202 QDXP gained

Lootable

Rogue AI GI72143AA - Level 62

Defeated

+768 QDXP gained

Lootable

Level up! (Level 52)

…

Level up! (Level 62)

“Oh, shit!” Maya cried.

She turned to see scores of red eyes turn upon her.