Re:Cursed

Chapter 164 160: Unexpected Guest

Ta'Stralanov'r left a subordinate thread of her consciousness to install the upgraded concealer into the child who seemed entirely too lackadaisical about her own nature. She trusted Ta'Taish to deal with any problems that arose… even if he was the cause of them. Instead, a good portion of her processing threads shifted below. Down into the generator that powered her plasma circuitry.

A god had infected her machine.

To call it undesirable would be an understatement. With most of her resources already occupied by Coral AI, this sudden assault could come at no worse a time. The occurrence was unexpected. It almost made her regret the choice to forgo her most accurate predictive algorithms. But the reason for such remained as ever. It was not worth the risk of an Eidolon's ire, especially with the presence of a creature that called their attention so vehemently.

Her sensor suite indicated a collapse in the entire catalyst ignition sector. She locked it down. Severing its connection to the main reactor and turbine left the system stranded from its regulator. Lowering the output power by twenty percent, she was able to reroute it through a temporary feedback loop which would keep the generator running.

A temporary patch at best. Another part of her mind was already quick at work recreating the ignition control from scratch. Any part touched by this unwelcome god would be discarded to the depths below. Such infections never truly left once they'd taken root.

Ta'Stralanov'r queried the logs. As with most problems, it was foolish to approach them without a full understanding. They returned to her corrupted. Insanity pilfered the edge of her mind, trying to alter thoughts and knowledge as it was in her head.

This was something she had expected.

Coral AI, linked to her as much as she was to him, discovered the intruder in her systems and pressed the advantage. Thousands of Data-Spawn spilled into the affected storage facility a nanosecond before she was able to reengage the corruptive protections. Only its lack of link outside her own servers saved the system from the same onslaught of malware she faced at other fronts.

Each Data-Spawn was swatted like the annoying gnats they were, but the damage had been done. The logs were altered. Filled with misleading and sometimes nonsensical information that still entirely fit the parameters of the system they recorded. It took her an entire second of intense decrypting while fending off the touch of insanity to recover some understanding of what those spawn had altered in an instant.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The problem had begun with an accretion particle collector. She speculated the intensifying tidal disruption event was the cause, yet as she read on, it was revealed the origin was rather the automated sacrificial ritual that enabled the collector's basic functions.

Strange. How had this god found a strong enough anchor in this basic ritual?

She traced the itemised list of sacrificed scrap back to their source, and quickly found one that didn't match. Discarded human tissue. Not terribly out of the ordinary, albeit certainly not the most common waste. Only… it came from a washroom now soaked with blood.

"N̪ỷx̱̽ala, you didn't… deposit your ears in the trash, did you?"

The girl glared up at the ceiling. Not long had passed; the tool only now cut into her arm. "I did."

For all Ta'Stralanov'r knew how important Nyxala could become, she hadn't foreseen the true extent of the value laying in the girl's flesh. A perfect sacrifice — as she had called herself — as that old experiment had foretold — was more true than she had been able to conceive. The blood tests returned impressive results, but under any any standard model, her body shouldn't have had enough ritual power to summon a god without there being at least a ritual intending to extract that value, or the girl somehow regarding her ears as her most important possession.

Which, considering the method of disposal, wasn't likely.

This wasn't the perfect conditions of a Dark Star. A god had spawned from the automated sequence of a low tier ritual without the even the presence of a mind to influence the outcome. By all means, even with the most capable material in all of reality, it should not have been enough for the being to reach through Ta'Stralanov'r's safeguards.

"From now on, leave any body parts you suddenly decide you don't need with me. I'll have them disposed properly."

"Why should I?" Nyxala challenged.

Ta'Stralanov'r would have pulled her hair if she still had any. Nyxala was supposed to be mentally an adult, so why did Ta''Stralanov'r have to deal with a snarky teen? How much more of a mess was she going to cause. Worse: anything the girl did seemed to throw off her predictions.

The god deep below finally realised the bounds of its encasement. Another tremble reached through her temple's dampeners as it shattered a dozen of the sealing rituals she'd already layered the system it now inhabited. The quake was powerful enough that Nyxala clearly felt it, even as she was held still by the brace that now exposed bone and the bits of metal that sunk into it.

Ta'Taish had already pricked the girl with every sensor suite he had access to. It was overkill for what was more a brutal Bodytwister surgery than her typical precision, but she couldn't fault him his desire for perfection.

With Nyxala's Feat, it really would have been quicker and easier to sever the arm entirely. Ta'Stralanov'r was glad she didn't.

"That is why," she said. "Your flavour seems to attract the worst of vermin."