Weapons of Mass Destruction

Chapter 542: Champion´s heart

Whitey and I sit together on the playground merry-go-round—the kind with the disc in the center you spin to make it rotate. Moving slowly at first, then gradually picking up speed when Whitey decides to cheat, adding in his own kinetic energy to make it spin faster.

Lissandra is still on the bench nearby, watching us.

“Do you like this floor?” I ask her.

“Not quite, but it suffices well enough for simple training.”

“Are you not interested in the floor quest, the mimics, and all that?”

”I’ve already spoken with the Mimic Progenitor and the lumoran Absolute. I swore an oath to refrain from acting against either side for the next three months, provided neither sets foot in this valley or the lands surrounding it.”

I take a moment to process and then simply accept it. Of course, she did something like that.

“So that means you’re already operating at the Absolute level?”

”People these days... content to name anyone they pass on the street an ʼAbsolute.ʼ I am far from such a thing.”

“So why would they listen?” I ask, absorbing some of the kinetic energy so that the wheel doesn’t break, much to Whitey’s disappointment.

Lissandra taps on the bench’s armrest. ”From their perspective, which is incorrect, either one could, in theory, defeat me. Yet, should they act against me, I might align myself with the other side. But while they think they could end me, they still fear I’d bring down all their Champions before falling.”

“Do they even have that many Champions left? The mimics just lost six of them, some even had hosts,” I ask.

“Little pup, you’ve been here for a few weeks and still know nothing about the mimics?”

“Here we go,” Whitey smirks using my distraction to leap off the wheel and move over to the swings.

I let the wheel keep spinning, regaining sight of Lissandra once each rotation.

“I was busy,” I tell her.

”Of course you were.” She leans back on the bench. ”The Progenitor Mimic, as you surely know, cannot create an infinite number of mimics. It is also the only mimic incapable of taking a host, while it maintains a sort of hive-mind connection with all the others. The stronger these mimics are, the more powerful their connection to the Progenitor becomes.”

“So where is it getting so many Champion grade mimics?”

”There are a few possibilities, but simply put: it can ”raise” its mimics to that rank, but they must fight and level to achieve it. This Progenitor seems to be fairly old. It’s likely that it’s traversed a few worlds already, either laying them to ruin and moving on or fleeing them. Going by the strength of its mimics, however, it is not terribly ancient.”

“So it travels from planet to planet, strengthening its kin and building up its numbers.”

“Yes.”

“But with all that bullshit, taking over hosts and staying hidden, that seems like it’d be really bad.”

”Only if the defending Absolute falters, as the lumoran one did. Under his negligence, the Progenitor Mimic managed to infiltrate this place and construct a stable teleportation node.”

“So you’re saying that either the Progenitor Mimic found some Coordinates and broke through whatever planetary defenses this place had, then started summoning others, or it crashed here after hitching a ride on a meteor or something.”

“Very likely.”

The wheel finally stops spinning, and I turn it a bit further so that I wind up facing Lissandra. Off to my right, I hear the swing rocking and see Whitey’s legs in my peripheral vision as he swings.

”With all these improvements and their ability to adapt to detection methods, how do you ensure you get rid of all the mimics once the war is over?” I ask.

”Once it reaches the stage it has here, it becomes near impossible. You would need either a specialized Absolute to confirm or, more likely, intervention by a Ruler to be entirely certain. Without either, the neighboring coalition of planets might very well decide to destroy yours outright as a precaution. That is likely what happened here in the first place.”

“Kaboom,” Whitey shouts happily.

“Yes, yes, kaboom,” I reply. Then I jump off the wheel and sit back on my wooden horse, which is closer to Lissandra. “So that means the war between the Lumorans and the mimics will likely intensify.”

“What makes you think so?” She watches me with interest.

“Well, after three months, they probably think you’ll interfere, and they don’t know which side you’ll join, so they’ll try to finish it before then.”

For a fleeting moment, she smiles and nods. “Or they might bunker up, prepare, and try to get me on their side by any means possible.”

“I don’t think they will.”

“Why?”

“You probably told them not to annoy you, or you’d join the other side.”

“Sounds like something that silver haired cockroach would do, from what I’ve seen in your memories,” Whitey laughs, swiftly skipping closer.

He meets Lissandra’s gaze easily as he sits on the bench beside her. “What? Do you think I’m scared of you, human? I know about you from his memories and I don’t give a shit; at worst you can-”

Unable to finish, he crumples onto the ground, mouth wide open, body twisted in a painful spasm. Yet he makes no sound, no screams escape his lips.

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Some people have to learn the hard way, I guess.

“Did you get that Champion’s heart from the pyramid for me?” I ask.

“What do you think?”

“Probably, but that leaves the question of whether you think I deserve it.”

”If you havenʼt improved, it will be of no use to you, so merely seeing whether you can use it will serve as a test in itself. You will find it after we finish here.”

“We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and we’re already prepared for the surgery. I’m sure something will go wrong, but I should be able to survive a few small screw-ups. We’ll need to place limiters on it though and remove them over time so it doesn’t fry me immediately.”

“Do whatever you want, little pup.” She stands and moves over to Whitey, prodding him with the toe of her shoe. “I’m very well acquainted with demons. I have faced your Absolutes many times and often had the misfortune of dealing with them.”

She drops into a squat so she can look into his eyes, grabbing his horns to force him to face her. “I recognize your talent and the effort you’ve put in, but I don’t appreciate the tone you’ve taken with me. And don’t mistake my silence for permission.”

After that, she lets go and disappears.

Only then does Whitey slowly begin to move, pulling himself up and onto the bench with a long, painful, sigh. For a minute he sits there with his eyes closed as I continue to sense the pulses of contractions rippling through his body.

“That bitch is crazy crazy,” he says simply.

Rocking forth and back on my wooden horse, I nod.

When I leave my mind space after fighting Whitey, LissLiss isn’t anywhere to be seen. Instead, I awaken to find a human heart being chucked into the dirt at my feet.

It’s the Heart of the Champion Laten from the 5th floor—a man who once had command over thermal energy and the capacity to convert the force of his planet’s largest magma chamber into mana. What a legend.

If I recall correctly, people thought he might have had the potential to become the next Absolute of that planet. However, his planet ultimately fell to the Veil, a creation born from the tortured remains of the powerful beast they used as its core.

I pick up the heart and try to clean off the dirt, but the moment I touch it, it falls from my hand much to my surprise.

Why?

I glance at my hand—it’s gone. Charred flesh marks the stump where it disappeared, and the burn continues to spread. I feel the intense heat and quickly cut off my arm at the elbow. The limb drops to the ground and burns.

Interesting. Why doesn’t the ground around the heart burn?

I squat in front of it and create a stick of mana to poke at the heart. It instantly evaporates under the sheer force of the heart’s heat.

So it reacts to mana? But doesn’t that mean it should be reacting to the ambient mana in the air? Or is there some limit?

Over the next hour, I try picking it up with no success. The heart just lies there in the dirt, beating slowly.

I still remember the effect it had on that pool of molten metal and the pyramid as a whole, the heat waves it sent through everything. The fact it only reacts to my touch now probably means Lissandra did something to it, at least partially “sealing” it.

Well, this is going to take a while.

Myrra squawks and leaps into the air, her tail stiff recoiling from the burn on her hand, the one she got trying to poke the heart on the ground.

Sophie stares at her, almost in disbelief. “Didn’t she study under that woman she arrived with?”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” I say.

“Fuck off, feral one,” Myrra snarls before licking her hand and heading over to Lily. She pokes our healer and extends her burned palm.

Lily smiles and heals it. Myrra ruffles her hair in thanks, then rushes back to the heart, studying it more closely.

“Didn’t Lissandra show it to you?” I ask Myrra.

“She just stored it in some box and wouldn’t let me see what it was. She said if I wanted a look, I had to get into the box, but I couldn’t.”

Everyone in Group 4 is here. Sophie, Lily, and the twins are all standing over the heart with me. The rest have gathered as well, to do their own things nearby.

Tess and Maya are up on the cliff, breaking trees and building a large fire. They’re setting logs on the ground for us to sit on. Tonight there’s no manabloc furniture or thermal pyramids for lighting, just a good old-fashioned cookout with the food we’ve collected.

“We could probably move it if we just dug up the entire chunk of ground it’s lying on,” Sophie suggests.

I nod. “Wanna bet we’d burn the house down in the process? It’s better to do it here; the weather is nice, after all.”

Dennis asks, “Do you think we can finish it before the tournament? It doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy.”

“It’s fine. The heart is for me, so I’ll do most of the prep. You can all continue with your own training. I looked it over, and Lissandra did create a base for me to build on. I can use that base to create a set of seals to lessen the heart’s output, and they’ll only improve once I connect them to the construct I intend to form inside my body.”

“Couldn’t that woman do it? It would save us a lot of time,” Sophie says, backing away from the heart. She then manipulates a thread of water and splashes Izzy with it.

Myrra laughs at Sophie’s question. It would seem that she knows Lissandra as well as I do.

“That’s not how Lissandra thinks. She’d rather just chuck it into my chest and watch me either survive and get stronger in the process or die,” I say.

Izzy, who just got splashed with cold water, flings Noodle at her sister. Surprised Noodle, currently about the length of my forearm, flies through the air before swelling up to the size of an anaconda and landing on Sophie.

Sophie falls down laughing, and Izzy charges in, splashing her with water of her own from a nearby stream. Biscuit is there too, nipping at Sophie’s legs.

Myrra watches everything with her cat-like yellow eyes wide, the tips of her ears twitching.

Noodle slithers away from the scuffle and moves toward me. I give him permission, and he shrinks before worming his way into my shirt sleeve to hide.

“Do you want to start preparing the heart or work on fixing the Fracture first?” Dennis asks.

”Why not both? Besides, I’ll need to modify my current Thermokinetic Mana Heart so that it only generates kinetic energy and mana. That alone should increase my kinetic output. I’ll also have to consider what I’m going to do with the Vortex Core. Maybe I’ll remove it entirely and try out some other ideas I’ve been mulling over.”

”Yeah, because having a second heart that could incinerate you with a single beat isn’t terrifying enough,” Sophie remarks, gently nudging Biscuit aside.

”Sophie, this is important. Third Floor Nathaniel created a Kinetic Mana Heart, even though it almost blew him up in the end. I can’t let myself fall behind.”

I turn my attention back to the heart. It rests in the dirt, beating steadily. Even sealed as it is, it continues to radiate a heat that warns me against getting too close.

It’s a cute, if dangerous little thing, quiet for now, but brimming with the potential to go horribly wrong.

And I’m all for it.