The thread of lightning touched the exposed interior of the chip, lightly touching one of the Inscriptions.
Now that I had not damaged the chips, what I saw inside of them was amazing... the Inscription, etched in the dense metal of the chips, seemed to be alive. The glow from the chip came from the tiny lights being emitted from each of these etchings, and the moment my thread touched the light, all the activities inside the chip froze, and it went dead.
"Shit," I whispered in irritation as I glanced at the other chip that was now dead. Although I had done everything right, I still made a mistake in the end as I did not expect Inscriptions to have such... lifelike activity.
"Our presence was detected before we could infiltrate the system," the Hollow Avatar said.
"Yeah, I noticed," I sighed.
"However, before the connection was interrupted, I was able to collect a small amount of data."
"You never fail to impress me, Hollow. What did you get?"
"I was able to get the dimensions of this place; however, this information could be wrong since I may have seen only one section of this facility that could be found in this network."
"Sure, we would know more in the future. Give me what you have."
As I was saying this, I stood up and glanced at the dead chips in my hands with exasperation. I could still feel the wave of coldness washing across my skin, and I knew that I was being watched. Was it coming from the hooded statues lining the hallways of this place, or from another hidden location? I could not really tell.
In this place, I realized another hidden effect of essence that I had taken for granted. Even without lightning essence, just the presence of essence in the air was enough for the soul of an Adept to be able to have a great awareness of their surroundings.
They could tell when other magical objects or people were in their surroundings due to the movements of essence in the space around them. These were another set of eyes that I had that had been robbed from me.
In a space filled with essence, I should be able to tell if these statues were the window someone was using to observe me, because the essence in the air would be active around the statue, but I could not tell, and I did not want to be observing the statues to alert anyone looking through it.
I was discovering that Storm Sense depended a lot on the lightning essence in the air to transmit information to me, and in this place, it was almost useless, and I had to depend more on my mundane senses.
Already, I could tell that my actions were very odd to an observer. Anyone else who wakes up in a strange place would be panicked and looking for ways to escape, but I was doing none of those things; instead, I was carefully investigating, and to anyone watching, they would know this plain truth just from observing me... I was not afraid.
Sure, I was aware that if a Sovereign-level power appeared in front of me, I would be helpless, but that was just it, helpless, not afraid. I had died too many times that the idea of fearing death, even if it may turn out to be permanent, did not scare me as it should.
I did not want to die, but that did not mean that I was scared of it.
I began slowly moving through the hall, looking all around me, barely glancing at the large vats as I walked past, just noting them and moving on.
The Hollow Avatar paused for a moment, as if it was aware of my thoughts and was giving me time to think before it replied to the question I asked it a few seconds ago,
"Before the line died, I mapped a part of its node. There was not a lot of data, but I could extrapolate the dimensions of this... facility from these nodes. It is roughly 1,600 metres from end to end. Four hundred across at its widest. And it rises, floor to the vaults you cannot see, near two hundred metres."
Wow, this was a rather large facility, and as I looked at the statues and embellishments beside the vats and stele, resembling a mixture between old tradition and modern advancements, I could not help but see this as a massive temple that had been retrofitted into something new.
This place could potentially hold hundreds of thousands, and it was more like a small village than a single facility, and I let a part of my mind simply process the scale of this place.
I sighed; the feeling of being watched was getting on my nerves, and I began to move. I could imagine that these eyes had been watching me for months as my mind was eaten, and the fury at that violation began to bubble up again.
The fury that the Hollow Avatar promised would be rained down upon us if the intrusion into their system was detected, a part of me was beginning to look forward to it.
I became Lightning Incarnate, and I vanished, appearing forty meters away... With the size of this facility, I needed speed.
∞
The first thing I noticed, three Stormsteps into the facility’s depths, was that nothing tried to stop me.
I had braced for the net the watcher should have been drawing tight, and if it was too much for me, one hand was already on the suicide button. Even with my Title, I was still keeping a sharp lookout, but there were no movements.
As I went deeper, I began to see the knights, dozens of them, ranked down the hall in tight formations, and every single one of them stood frozen.
Some of them had stopped mid-stride, and I paused for a moment to see the dozens of armored corpses caught in the middle of motions they did not finish.
"I did this," I said slowly.
"Yes, our intrusion into this network has been met with this response," the Avatar agreed. "For one of the primary defense networks of this facility to be cut off at the barest hint of our intrusion tells me that the creator of this network is not present, and whoever cut us out would rather lose this guardian force than allow us deeper access into the system."
"Well, these knights were useless anyway," I replied.
"That is for you, but for an average mage whose magic would not be easily recovered in a place like this, then these knights are the perfect weapons."
"So, until these chips are reactivated, I should not fear any attack from these undead knights. If that is the case, let us hurry. If they know one defense is useless against me, then there is no reason not to think another isn’t being activated."