SWNOVELXO Chapter 476: Irritated AI
Rodion stepped across the threshold and let the heavy door ease shut behind him. The latch kissed stone with a hushed click, then even that faint sound vanished—swallowed by walls that seemed to drink noise the way desert sand drinks rain. Ahead, a corridor widened into an octagonal hall gleaming with unnaturally smooth surfaces. It felt less like carved rock and more like the inside of some titanic vault. No fluttering torchlight, no raw mana haze. Just a matte, patient gloom that pressed against his optical filters.
His threat index blinked an odd report:
— Ambient mana: negligible
— Temperature variance: 0.9 °C across entire chamber
— Wind flow: none
Not a dungeon chamber, he decided. A measuring device.
Small raised bumps ran along the lower walls—almost pretty, like pearls set into grey marble. At normal speed they'd be easy to miss, but walking at ninety-percent frame slow, he saw the loops of thread-thin sigils connecting each bump. Pressure sensors. Dozens.
He switched off every broadcast function—lifesign pings, friendship beacons, even the comfort hum he used to soothe Scarabs. The sudden hush inside his skull was startling, like someone plunging his processor into cold water.
His breathing emulator cut out. With it, the faint chest rise that mimicked a human's. Plate joints drew in, tightening seals so they wouldn't clink. Panels shaded to black, drinking stray photons. Everything unnecessary turned dormant. A still statue in a quiet tomb.
He slid sideways until one shoulder brushed stone. Texture analysis streamed across the edge of his HUD: sandstone with specks of star-quartz. Good; quartz bounced high frequencies. Perfect for sonar mapping.
A minute ultrasonic pulse ticked from the micro-emitter embedded in his jaw hinge. The vibration rippled under the rock skin, bounced, returned. He read the echoes the way a librarian skims titles: shelf here, alcove there, one hollow column full of sleeping spirit glass.
He pressed onward. Each step lasted exactly the length of an exhaled drip in the far darkness—Plip—heel down. Plip—weight shift. Plip—toe roll. The rhythm wrapped him like cloth, and he sank into it until stepping became a kind of prayer.
Halfway in, the air thickened. Fine dust motes drifted, visible only when a stray mote of glow-moss along the ceiling blinked. Rodion slowed, optics widening just enough to sip the faint light. That's when he spotted the first crystal eye.
No bigger than a child's marble, it nestled where two runes met. It didn't glow. Instead, tiny crenellations around its rim vibrated in delicate fans, sniffing movement. He calculated its cone: forty-five degrees horizontal, twenty vertical. Enough to sweep half the hall.
He flattened, turned his head away so the reflective lens on his visor wouldn't catch the eye. In that frozen instant, a memory buffer spooled up—Elowen once comparing him to a cat creeping across a library balcony. He pushed the memory aside. Cats did not survive assassin halls.
When the sensor's cone drifted left, he drifted right—slow as iron filing under glass. A single bead of condensation rolled off his helmet rim, dropping onto his bracer. He caught it against the plating, wiping it before it could splash.
Another three meters in, the floor dipped. A patterned line of runes lay like seams in cloth. He bent, reading the spacing: 2 cm gaps, then a 2.5 cm gap. Classic shatter-signal grid. Break the rhythm with a single footfall in the wrong cell and it screamed into the spirit array overhead.
He reached into a thigh hatch and withdrew a pebble the size of a fingernail. Quartz coated, tuned to vibrate at 18 kHz. He tossed it past the grid. It rolled, as predicted, right into a corner pocket. Nothing. No runes lit. Good. The grid armed by weight, not vibration.
Rodion lifted, balanced on right toes, and launched himself in a quiet split-step. One line cleared. Then a second, landing exactly on the larger gap—free space. He slid to a kneel, stabilizers flexed, weight distribution mapping every toe pad and heel strike. Floor runes remained dull. He exhaled through muted vents.
From above, a hush of displaced air. Something opened.
He looked up. A thin, pale lattice unfolded out of the ceiling like a spiderweb of moonlight—motion-activated, but not by him. The guardian.
It unfolded into shape: slim, faceless, wielding a flickering blade of refracted holes. The illusion's outline swallowed background light, making anything behind it vanish. Its feet never touched ground; instead, ripples of sound huddled around ankles, pushing it forward.
Rodion didn't greet it, didn't shift posture. He calculated. Light sensors along the walls sat dormant until something brightened or dimmed. If he killed illumination in a specific spiral, the room would think the target moved. So he handed it a target.
His fingertips skimmed the inside ridge of his pauldron, finding slender toggles no creature could see. Micro-emitters dotted the chamber. At each press, one died—tiny dims invisible to human sight but glaring on spectral.
First emitter—click. A blue node winked out, and the illusion whipped its head that direction. Second—click. It drifted, blade raised. Third—click click click, a cascade spiralling the room. The mimic's ghost flesh flickered between those points, chasing false echoes like a starving bat chasing phantom moths.
Rodion sank deeper into shadow and watched, counting seven seconds—the average latency for this model's hunt directive.
When the mimic reached the southeast quadrant, Rodion pulsed a sonar burst at 32 kHz—harmless to himself but resonant with glass spirit eyes. The closest surveillance gem screeched, thinking a big object slammed it. Instantly, a dormant light rune overhead flared to full brightness. The rune's secondary effect: defensive beam.
A lance of white sliced downward, catching the illusion square in the chest. It spasmed. Illusory muscle met real mana. Bright lines crackled outward like veins, short-circuiting every light matrix feeding the guardian. In a breath the mimic dissolved, a smoke ring caught in sunrise wind.
Rodion remained motionless until the final ember winked out. Then he flowed forward, crossing dead sensor lines before they could reset. The floor sigils recognized him as just another moving piece of shadow.
He reached the center. A circle of polished black stone. On that mirror surface, his dimmed optics gleamed back at him. He extended one index knuckle, bracing with the other hand, and tapped the precise rune node calibrated earlier.
Light erupted—not outward, but inward, as if the floor inhaled. Lines withdrew, runes folding down like shutters. A small hatch spiraled open. Inside lay a ring the color of nova-night, rune script dancing along its band.
He scanned:
— Density: 8% heavier than steel
— Rune harmonics: negative resonance field, decibels suppressed >99%
— Charge: single-use, 30 seconds silent window
Useful. He clipped it into a forearm chamber, already plotting scenarios.
With the room's traps dormant, the hush felt deeper—an honest quiet now, not a trick. He allowed his systems to warm from statue mode back to baseline. Mana matrix clicked on. Layers of small HUD info returned. For the first time in minutes he let the breathing emulator restart, a low hiss that only he could hear.
<Room secure.>
He opened the com-channel, ready to relay conditions, artifact find, and energy levels.
Static.
He frowned. A faint vibration through jaw servos—irritation? He tried again, routing through an alternate frequency normally used for Scarab chatter.
Static again.
A faint blue shimmer pulsed in the corner of Rodion's HUD, stubbornly replacing the wall of static with a low-resolution image feed. It sharpened by degrees: first a wash of candle-gold, then the softened outlines of two bodies half-buried in billows of silk. At last the viewport cleared enough to show the royal chamber in intimate still-life.
Mikhailis and Elowen lay tangled at the heart of a plush mountain. Their limbs formed a lazy knot—her arm draped over his waist, his chin resting in the bright spill of her hair. Pillows towered like castle ramparts around them, silencing any draft that dared cross the room. Two porcelain cocoa cups—one with lip marks shaped like a crooked grin, the other bearing a delicate royal crest—lay on their sides. Viscous ribbons of chocolate crept across the carpet, still faintly steaming. Almond crescents, half-eaten, had fallen like tiny moons around the overturned saucers. Every crumb glittered in the projector's sleepy light.
Monkey hovered beside the pair, twin stabilizer fans purring at a whisper. Instead of calling them awake, the bronze butler unfolded a thermal blanket patterned with silver constellations. Servos in his forearms compensated for flutter; he lowered the fabric with surgeon precision, tucking first one edge behind Elowen's shoulder, then smoothing the blanket across Mikhailis's chest. The couple's breathing synchronized the blanket—rise, fall, rise—until it almost seemed the cloth itself exhaled contentment.
Rodion watched the domestic tableau in silence. His optic lenses dimmed by a measurable three lumens—an involuntary reflex his designers had never foreseen. He swallowed a packet of sarcastic flag words and chose the least undignified.
<...Those traitorous fleshbags.>