Capture Target

Tch… where is she…?

Hrm?  Oh, no, it’s just -- something should have happened last night, and there should be a sign of it…

Can we wait just a few more minu - EEK!

Okay, okay!  No need to tug my piercings!

At least fuck me if you’re going to do that!

---

So.  Big Bull and his ‘confession’.

…It was faked.

Absolutely, one hundred percent, fake.

Did he have a romantic interest in me?

Yes.  Yes he did.

Did he have enough to propose?

No, absolutely not.

The entire thing was a lie, told purely to get me the blessing that I needed.  I have no idea how they convinced him to do a fake proposal, but it, technically, worked.

This is the problem of triggering the climax of the plot a few months earlier than planned!

Yes, obviously I’d prefer if it had been real!  W-wait, no, I mean no!  Maybe!  I don’t know, shut up, I’m not a slut, it's storytime!

Anyway, my face fell flat as I processed what Big Bull was saying; I pushed the bouquet of roses and the ring back into his hands and marched off.

He just gave a bemused chuckle, before he turned and started giving orders to disassemble the camp and retreat away from the border.

---

My lack of sleep was really starting to get to me.

Remember, MISSY isn’t a well-designed world.  It doesn’t matter how much training you have, or how much practice you get.  If you do not sleep through two time slots a day, you get sleepy, and that gets worse with time -- both literal time and time slots.  The only exception is if you have an appropriate talent, which I did not.

And with the magic heels I was using, everything from the moment I grabbed the power crystal from the generator?  It was all a single time slot.  I couldn't rest longer than a few minutes, or else the world would register me as no longer traveling, the heels' magic would deactivate, and the time slot would transition to the next time slot.  

Which, along with whatever else it meant, would mean I'd failed to get the blessing from Kaiser that I needed to get in the same time slot as the blessing I'd gotten from Big Bull.

So I kept going.

If it wasn’t for the food and stamina pills and potions, I would have utterly collapsed.  By the time the plan had reached its final point, I was all but dead on my heels as I stumbled into the center point of the third landmass.  The one spot where all three forces could meet each other.

Unlike the rest of the land, it was a giant, massive crater.  The cause of the crater was obvious -- right in the center of it was a massive rectangle made of Atlantean alloy.  A bunker, of sorts.  It was tilted at roughly thirty degrees, with a good portion of the bunker wholly underground.  Two massive doors, the entrance, were visible on the side that was on the surface.

The rest of the crater was a ruin.

None of the three leaders could progress in this area without the other two forcing them back.  They’ve all tried; they all want the bunker, for the metal if nothing else, but none would let another have it.  And as they had no way of splitting it, no way of sharing it, none would work together to obtain it.

It was this bunker that could result in an early game over and new game plus in Alchemical Corruption Twelve.

I explained it a while ago, back at the start of the third year, but here’s a refresher: If you have the Atlantean Key, you can use it to open the doors; inside is a rather spacious -- reception area, I suppose?  -- at the back of which is another, smaller door.  

If you open that door… well, then things get weird, but if you take things at face value, the chief god is happy for some reason and grants you a wish.  Resulting in further new game plus bonuses.

I had just stumbled into the crater and was half jogging, half sliding down the edges towards the bunker when I realized that I had vastly underestimated its size.  The doors were each three times Kaiser’s height!  The keyhole was at proper ‘human’ height, but the building itself was massive!

I knew what was coming, so I moved towards the center as fast as I could.  And good thing, too.  I could see ahead of me, as I reached about halfway to the center, the heads of cyber-dragons starting to reach over the lip of the crater.  Three heads, six heads, nine heads -- I nearly stumbled when I realized that the Empirical Empress had a solid eight cyber-dragons.  Each of them was a boss in their own right!

The Empress crested the horizon herself, not on a dragon.  Her normally perfect attire was in tatters; you could see the pneumatic tubes that were her muscles were parts of her body were shorn off.  There was a crack on the left side of her face that had torn off most of her cheek and part of her lip, revealing the disturbing mechanical skull beneath it.  One leg had been all but torn away, leaving only the internal framework there to keep her balanced.

She was dripping oil and pneumatic pressure fluid at irregular intervals.  Her shorn of leg was occasionally spurting some kind of caustic acid that further scarred her skeletal framework and dug into the dirt around her.  Her entire appearance was smeared with dirt and blood and detritus.

Her eyes glowed when she saw me -- but then she looked behind me and almost snarled.  I quickly glanced and saw Big Bull walking to the edge of the crater, with a small selection of his most potent forces.  Along with him were Shimizu and Takeo, and Hayato, standing with a small unit of Kingdom royal guard.

Still, that didn’t stop the Empress from starting to descend into the crater.  The cyber-dragons walking and flying behind her.  She didn’t even seem worried.

…Until I felt a thump through the earth, and nearly fell over despite my heels.

I looked to where it came from and saw a sight that chilled me to the bones.

Kaiser is one of the strongest non-divine combatants in all of the Alchemical Corruption series.  Comparing stats between different games is a fool's errand, and all the top-tier combatants are a convoluted tangle of specialties that turns the question of ‘who beats who’ into a question of circumstances and good-bad matchups, but one can look at the effects of their existence and use that for a rough estimate of their raw power.

From what I recall from before I arrived at MISSY… Kaiser was estimated to be roughly peers with Hayato, with Kaiser taking a solid lead if they were fighting in the Wildlands jungles and Hayato having a small lead in most every other circumstance.  

However, there is a massive difference between the two.

Hayato uses weapons, armor, and potions.

Kaiser did not.

In fact, to talk about the game lore alone, out of all of the candidates to the title of ‘the strongest mortal in the world’ in the entire Alchemical Corruption series, Kaiser was unique in that he was the only one that uses no external tools to enhance their strength.

He does not have armor or weapons.  He does not have servants or soldiers.  He does not have blessings or curses.

He has his body.

That’s it.

So when I saw that Kaiser had landed in the crater in fully enchanted, perfectly fitted, royal guard armor?

I think I nearly twisted an ankle when I almost fell down just from seeing that.  Only my magical super-heels kept me standing upright.

Instinctively, my eyes went to look for Takeo, who looked just as horrified as I did.  And he lived through a timeline where Kaiser invaded the Kingdom!  Even then Kaiser used no arms or armor beyond some simple leathers!

I learned after the dust settled that Hayato had, somehow, claimed Kaiser as his student and disciple.  

Which is.  Just.  

Utterly terrifying.  

And I knew that Kaiser was well aware of what the sight of ‘him in armor’ did to those that looked at him.

I could tell he was smirking at the reactions his appearance garnered.  I couldn’t see his face through his helmet, but I knew he was smirking.

While I was stunned, the Empress called out, “Hiding behind armor like a coward now, Kaiser?!”

Kaiser merely laughed.  His deep laughter echoed throughout the crater.  “All that matters is victory!  I've learned that, now!"  I can still imagine the fierce grin he must have had.  "Let me show you what else I've learned, witch!"

Kaiser was always faster than felt natural.  I think that by now he's gotten a little bit faster still, but even back then, it was like seeing a landslide, or a collapsing skyscraper.  Something that big shouldn't move that fast.  It did something to your brain, that kind of jerk-knee animal fear of being startled by a spider times one thousand.

Kaiser's armor didn't slow him down at all.

It just meant he didn't need to bother wasting his speed on dodging out of the way of lesser, weaker attacks.  

The only truly reliable winning strategy in his game boss fight is to wear him down with cheap shot bleed and poison status effects while you stall with strong gear, defensive moves, and a mountain of healing items.

So all the Empress's specialized anti-Kaiser weapons and tricks were just, blocked and deflected by his new armor, as Kaiser rushed in and launched her back up the crater slope with a flying kick to her suddenly-shattered breastplate.

And that was the start of the battle.

I just know, I just know that Kaiser started it before it was planned to.  I was only three quarters of the way to the vault as the dragons and anti-Empress coalition both charged at each other!  If I was any slower, I would've been trampled!  I needed to use some quick earth and wind magic to get me to the doors fast enough to escape.  

I nearly fumbled and dropped the key before I managed to open the door, slipped inside, and slammed it shut behind me.

---

I slid to the ground as the door shut behind me, panting, closing my eyes in my exhaustion.  When I called the first room of the bunker a ‘reception area’ I wasn’t joking; it looked decayed with age, but that was still clearly what it was.  There were several seats -- albeit scattered all over the place from whatever incident led to this thing being here -- and a small-ish desk embedded into the floor that was next to the doors that led further inward.  There was a sourceless light that gave the room just enough brightness to be easy to walk through without being hard to shut out.

I knew what I had to do.

I had to stay in that first room, and not open the secondary, inner doors.

Opening the inner doors would be stupid.  We’d been debating opening them or not all year, and there were some pretty heated arguments about it.  Back King Harold was the most intense of all of us about questioning whether the message was truly the chief god or if there was some kind of deeper message or deception at play, but his ultimate conclusion summarized my own opinion better than I did.

We had too many moving parts already.  We had a solid, workable plan already, and it was succeeding so far.  We had no idea what there was to gain from opening the door, if anything at all, and we had everything to lose.  

The safe, reliable, smart option, was to leave the inner bunker alone.

Also, I was exhausted!  

So I just shifted where I was to lean on the other end of the room -- as the entire floor was tilted -- took off my backpack, and closed my eyes.

I repeat.  I was exhausted.

I sat down for the first time in hours, and all thought of plans and gods fell right out of my head.  I needed to sleep.  I needed to rest.  I needed to not be running or awake any longer.

And I'd almost fallen asleep when the entire building shook.

My eyes snapped open.  This was a big building, and most of it was embedded into the earth.  It shouldn’t be shaking!

But it did.  And then it did again, and then it did a third time.

I curled up in the back of the room, eyes wide, but if that was it -- if that was it would probably have been fine?

Until the front door was dented.

Atlantean Alloy was stupidly durable -- it usually required sustained heat in a blast furnace in order to make any progress in warping it or damaging it.

…And apparently, Kaiser, with his utter bullshit strength, along with the strongest enchantments that the Kingdom could create, could dent the metal with his fists and feet.

It was then that I made a mistake.

The smart choice would have been to hide behind the desk -- or perhaps near the inner doors, ready to open them -- and wait.

It was only a dent.  Not even a particularly large one -- more like three small dimples of lines, from where Kaiser’s claws had rammed into it from the outside.  I hadn’t heard any metal tearing or breaking, and there were no holes that I could see.

The place was stable.

But I was half asleep, just jolted awake by the building I was in shaking, and saw something that was not supposed to be possible.

I wasn’t exactly making ‘smart choices’ as I grabbed my backpack and ran towards the inner doors, opened one, and slipped inside.

---

Nobody knew what was past the inner doors of the vault.  In the game, opening the doors results in all the characters expressing shock, then three sparks of light quickly overcome the screen before the chief god starts speaking and the game just ends.

Everyone's surprise in Alchemical Corruption Twelve made much more sense to me after I opened the door; Frankly, I'm sure I had the exact same shocked reaction to seeing that inside was a massive wedding hall.  

Unlike the previous room, in which unfixed furniture was all over the place, everything in this room was attached to the floor or walls.  There were somewhere between ten and twenty rows of pews, split down the middle with a red carpet marking the path to the altar.  

I stared for a long moment, trying to process what I was seeing in my half-asleep haze, when the building shook again.

And that unlodged the crystal from the backpack I was holding in my hands.  Since the building was tilted, it immediately started rolling down the red carpet.  

…In retrospect, uh, I had no need to keep the crystal in my hands, but as I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.  The crystal rolled all the way down to the steps leading to the altar, with me right behind.  When I caught it, I quickly fumbled to put it back in my backpack -- and then I noticed something else.

There was a box on the altar.

Unlike everything else, it wasn’t attached to the floor in any way.  I could tell because it was floating, perfectly, maybe an inch up from the altar.

The box looked like it was made from marble, possibly a thin film of it.  But what really caught my eye was the words engraved on it.

I couldn’t read everything because I was reading it backwards from my location, but I could see that the word ‘god’ was definitely part of it.  

I shuffled around to the other side to see in more detail, and the words said, ‘Our Proof of Love; No God Can Touch Us’.

I was half asleep.  The building was occasionally shaking.  I was worried that the fight might break into the room I was in.

And, most of all?

I was really, really, really curious about what was in that box.

So, like a moron, I opened it.

---

I need to go into a bit more detail about divine shards and Atlantean Alloy, here.

When you try to scan for divine shards, it doesn’t work.  Because you ping the world for divine shards, a divine shard picks up the ping, and it tries to simulate finding itself -- because it’s the closest divine shard to itself -- which means that it simulates itself trying to find itself, which means it simulates itself simulating itself trying to find itself… yeah, it doesn’t work.

The effects of shards, however, can be scanned for and detected.  For example, divine shards, when they aren’t intentionally hidden, tend to look like floating two dimensional diamonds of pure light, no matter what angle or direction you look at it from.  That is a form of interaction with the world, and that can be scanned for fairly easily.

Which brings me to Atlantean Alloy.  Atlantean Alloy doesn’t block the gods powers in the slightest.  It merely blocks their perception.  They can still go where Atlantean Alloy is located.  They can still attack areas protected by it.  It does nothing to stop them from physically showing up.  They just can’t sense it with any of their automated systems… which means they have to go there physically.

Which is a pain.

It’s why Atlantis constantly moves; to keep the gods from finding where it is.

This is important, because when, like the sleep deprived ditz that I was, I touched on the shards and absorbed it into me -- the first thing that I did was connect to the ‘World Shard’ to tweak the properties of reality for me just enough to remove all of my exhaustion and need for sleep.

I immediately realized just how fucking stupid that was.

It’s -- argh!

Look; by touching a divine shard and absorbing it into me, I became, in effect, a demigod.  I had a soul and a divine shard in my being.  This gave me all of the powers of a god… while letting me pretend to be mortal.

If I hadn’t done anything, I could have just kept that shard inside of me, and nobody would have any way of knowing!

Instead, what I did was remove my exhaustion.  I edited myself to be fresh, slept, and well rested.

The way that ‘reality’ works, the ‘rules of reality’, are written down in the ‘world shard’.  The divine shard at the center of the world, the one that keeps MISSY from returning to the formless abyss, the shard that the Atlanteans touched for just a moment to make Atlantean Alloy immune to the sight of the gods.

It’s also the shard that, since Atlantis did that, every single god had a connection to, to make sure no more mortals messed with how reality should work.

For most gods?

What I did meant absolutely nothing.

No god keeps track of what every other god is doing and where they are; it’s both a pain to do and functionally impossible to manage.  And my request was a mundane one -- remove exhaustion.  The gods use that same request regularly.

There was only one thing unusual about my request.

The location.

If any god was watching the battle on the third landmass, and they were also keeping an eye on strange divine shard requests, then they would immediately realize that something was wrong.

They wouldn’t have time to go and request others show up -- they could do so, yes, but it would take a Moment for them to get the message, and another Moment for them to react to it.  

So, instead, any god watching would go to the location of the request personally, to figure out what the fuck was going on.

I realized all of that in a panicked Moment.  A single Moment of time, which my new divine shard let me stretch out to an eternity of thought.

An eternity of panicked thoughts.

There was a possibility of gods showing up at any moment.

If I did anything with the shard, that action would be detected -- even if that action was moving the other two shards!

And, on top of that… there were three shards.

This was the remnant of an Axiomanager deciding to reside in Missy for the rest of their existence.

They’d suspect that there was a third one here.  Not know for certain, but with the value of these things, they’d certainly check me, personally.

If they realized I had one, I had no way to know what they would do.

I could take any number of discrete actions… but they would all take place at the exact same Moment.

Of course, I didn’t know for certain that gods would be showing up the very next Moment, but… if I was wrong, then I could just grab the other two shards at my leisure.  For now, I had to act like they would, just in case.

So.

I needed to keep whatever advantages I could scramble.

I needed to not have the gods suspect me of doing anything sneaky.

And I needed to do it in a way that the gods would leave me the fuck alone.

Thankfully, I figured a thread through that mess.

And the Moment I implemented my plan, Argenta and Roberta appeared, each of them grabbing one of the two remaining divine shards.