Afterlife 2.0 Chapter 38 — Why are you doing this to me, puzzle? Did I hurt you somehow?

Autumn was right, the facility was completely fucked. With all the Mana drained out of the building, all of the lights were off, but I think even if I hadn’t done that, most of them wouldn’t be functional anyway.

Whatever seismic activity occurred had caused the ceiling to collapse in several places. Nothing a bit of Earth Mana couldn’t fix, but it made the trip take a little bit longer.

At some point, a notification flickered in my vision, closing itself before I had even processed the fact it had opened. I could only guess this was the daily quest, because I had all other notifications set to silent. I was quite upset about the lack of a reward. I had just killed over one hundred million creatures, and I feel like I should have been compensated somehow for that fact. I complained about it to Autumn for most of the walk.

I presume they were emphatically empathizing with my position on the issue as they stared forward silently.

When we reached the ladder, I discovered an issue I had completely forgotten. If the facility were wrecked, due to seismic shifts, how damaged would the ladder be?

Well, after shining a bright light up the shaft, I discovered the answer to that. Very. About halfway up, the walls had crumpled inwards, and it now looked as if someone had squeezed an empty drink can.

“Maybe the other ladders are still functional? On the map here, it says there are… One more, alright, I feel like there should be more than that, but at least there was another one.” I said, already starting to head in the other direction. The other facility had nineteen safety exits, which felt correctly overdesigned to me.

Autumn made the equivalent of a hum, and I turned to look at them. They were still staring up the shaft.

“What?”

“I think we can make it.” They replied and began climbing the ladder. Are we going to try digging through the blockage? No harm in attempting that at least, we have all the time in the world… No, not all the time in the world, we had twenty-four—actually let’s call it twenty-three to be safe days until I spontaneously die.

I followed Autumn up the ladder, not because I knew what was going on, but because I was a good friend.

When we made it to the area right before the section that had been smashed to pieces, Autumn just sat there unmoving. I wasn’t sure if they were thinking or if they had entered a state where their mind turned off. I didn’t have to wait long for whatever it was as Autumn spoke up, “Hold my foot.”

I did as instructed.

Suddenly, I was being pulled through the roots of the world, and I had a brief moment of panic where it felt like we were about to fall off the Plane. Except that didn’t happen, we stopped while still inside the root structure, not quite out of the Plane but also not quite inside it either, as if we had just slid along a fourth dimension. Except that didn’t feel quite right, nestled in the roots, I could sense how they behaved much clearer now.

I felt a tug on my arm as Autumn somehow began pulling me upwards, our speed rapidly accelerating as we travelled through this in-between space. My thoughts travelled at a mile a minute, trying to catalogue all the information I was perceiving.

Directions didn’t really exist here, if you drew a four dimensional grid surface we’d be sitting at zero in the fourth axis. But despite that fact, we were travelling through solid stone as if it didn’t exist. 

A more apt, but still completely incorrect, comparison would be to say it was like a sleeping bag being stuffed back into its original packaging after use. The only way to keep it inside the bag it came in was to apply continuous force to fit it in. I don’t mean one of those sleeping bags that comes with a compression bag, because those are always easy to fit. I mean something like the bags rated for -30°C that are massive and come in tiny bags. That’s what Autumn was doing, stuffing us into a bag and holding us there such that we didn’t fall out.

Then that force vanished, and with a pop, we appeared just barely on the surface, hurtling upwards at a worrying speed. Luckily, I was rated for terminal velocity falls, so we should be fine.

While hurtling through the air, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the air in the space we appeared in. Because I was fairly certain my body wasn’t suddenly filled with a sparse gaseous substance. Was it pushed into the in-between space we just travelled through? Actually, that might describe the pop, all the air being forced back into reality around your body would probably do some weird stuff sound-wise. Huh, the more you know.

We slammed into the ground, and I was sent tumbling as the arc we had been travelling in wasn’t perfectly vertical. The moment my body hit the ground, I noticed Autumn was completely limp, so I wrapped myself around them the best I could when I needed to move that quickly and tried to cushion the blow.

After we finished rolling, I tried to check on Autumn, but they didn't respond, even when I did that snapping trick with Sound Mana that sounds like a bomb going off. I tried it a few times, too. For a couple of seconds, I could feel myself sitting in a trench under heavy artillery fire as I rapidly snapped my fingers. They didn’t even move in their sleep, which they shouldn’t even have to because plants don’t sleep. Right?

Maybe whatever magic they used was extremely Mana hungry, and Mana shortage means nap time? Or stamina perhaps? Would a plant even have stamina? I don't because I’m a small metallic sphere, but I wasn't certain about real plant people.

I threw Autumn over my shoulder and began my walk towards my old spawn point. Without someone to talk to, it was starting to feel a lot like when I first arrived in Eternia, walking through a barren, ashen wasteland. This time, I was walking across a sheet of glass that spans as far as the eye can see.

Wait, what, glass? I reconfirmed that fact and chuckled to myself. I hadn’t expected to be already glassing the surface of a planet, but apparently destroying the rift by overwriting reality is fairly energetic. I thought glassing a world was going to be like a thing I did once I had built my interstellar empire. Looks like I was getting ahead of the curve already.

Those facilities also had a fuckload of Mana though, shame I couldn’t possibly keep any. I need to find a good Mana storage material. So far, all the materials I have that hold a lot of Mana without spontaneously combusting also absorb the Mana to do something.

…

Right, okay, I’m bored and need to work on something. I still haven’t tried out that new puzzle because I was saving it for a moment when I could devote all my attention to it. This seems the best time to give it a try.

Upon opening, I was greeted with a familiar manor, along with a small packet of information outlining my goal, as well as some additional details about specific aspects of the puzzle.

Basically, there were several very valuable items on display within the manor, and a large group of bandits was going to attack and loot the building. I had to build traps or defences that would kill or incapacitate the bandits, but my actions couldn’t harm the manor’s retinue, or I would immediately fail. There was a list of duties that the staff were supposed to carry out, but their positions were randomized every attempt. This meant I couldn’t just firebomb the building when it was full of bandits.

There were certain conditions I could apply to the estate staff, such as making them carry artifacts. However, that seemed more expensive Mana-wise than growing defenses inside the manor.

The bandits would also be randomized to a certain extent. I wanted to know what that meant, so I just started time without having done anything. A large group of rough-looking men and women appeared outside the building, hiding in the surrounding foliage, and the manor was filled with workers.

They weren’t humans. Instead, it was a grey-skinned humanoid species. I was slightly annoyed about the fact that they were taller than the average human. I’m not insecure about my height, though. This is a perfectly normal reaction to seeing tall people.

The bandits appeared to be waiting for something, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Then suddenly they stood up and almost calmly walked into the building, gimping the gardeners on the way in. They walked without care down hallways, slaughtering whatever staff they came across. The bandit leading the group seemed to have a fairly strong Soul Refinement because he was able to move quickly enough that he could silently eliminate the staff before they raised alarm with a single swipe of his hand. Luckily, it didn’t matter if the bandits killed the retinue, but there was a note stating that a bonus would be awarded if I could complete the task without a single casualty or valuable being stolen.

I wasn’t going to try that until I completed the puzzle, though, because I had no idea how to save the gardeners.

The bandits took a straight path to the items I was supposed to keep safe and just walked out of the building with them. Only hurrying up after a passing maid found a body, she began screaming for help.

Once they had walked off the map, the puzzle reset.

I sat down mentally, part of my mind was tasked with automating body movements so I didn’t have to stop walking, and I tried to think about how I wanted to handle the problem.

The most obvious way to do it was to build turrets around the building, tracking movement. So that’s what I tried first. I didn’t really think that the puzzle would be able to be solved this easily, but I wanted to test cases to see what happened.

Using the same design as my eyes, I hooked up detectors to [Living Circuits] that would activate and move a turret on a ball joint to aim at whatever it detected. It would then begin unloading Klyven Dew bullets into the target that it pulled from a reservoir.

I started the simulation and immediately killed a gardener when the turrets detected her walking outside of the estate property, which reset everything I had done. They hadn’t left the property in the first attempt, so I thought that was safe to try that placement.

I let out a sigh. That was going to be a problem.

Luckily, my eidetic memory of circuits allowed me to instantly recreate the turrets. Except this time, I moved them out into the field around the manor, hidden in the grass.

I started the puzzle again, and a gardener once again wandered straight into the line of fire. Moving nearly one hundred metres from the manor, almost up to the end of the clearing around the estate. He walked like a man on a mission directly to the turret, then stood there, allowing himself to be gunned down. I think he even winked at me the moment before he died. The bandits didn’t do more than glance at him from their hiding spots.

Which told me something. I was definitely supposed to learn how to ensure the people employed at the manor wouldn’t activate any traps I’ve laid. Because otherwise, this was becoming a little bit ridiculous. It was either that or dealing with suicidal gardeners, just an average task in this world, maybe?

I thought about how to do this for a little while and came up with a solution I thought would work.

Unfortunately, this meant two more large sources of Mana drained from my reservoir, which I just decided to accept for now. This is because I was going to be using the conditional artifact dispensary system, which came with a side cost. Unlike any static defenses, the carried artifacts came with the assumption that they would need to be powered. A week of continuous use was applied to anything the staff was holding onto.

This meant building a charging station connected to my power supply, which I would register as the spot where they would recharge their artifacts. Otherwise, the devices would all just be dead at the start of the simulation. This information was provided in the knowledge packet tied to the puzzle.

Once that bit was done, which was fairly easy, just a pad with a pressure gate and a slot for an item to go, I then tagged it as ‘usable’ for the staff.

I had some other ideas for ‘usable’ artifacts, but the first one was going to be the simplest. Every staff member now had to wear a ring that would blink out a code in Raw Mana every five seconds.

The turrets I built had become slightly more complicated to accommodate, now instead of tracking only vision, they also looked at Mana flows. If they saw the exact code I applied to the rings, they would ignore that movement as a valid target.

I started up the simulation again, this time I had moved the defenses within the courtyard and around the front of the estate. My turrets began unloading their entire Mana and material supply into nearby small critters that hadn’t existed until this specific attempt.

Why are you doing this to me, puzzle? Did I hurt you somehow?

That fix just required me to lower the sensitivity of the turrets. However, this also significantly reduced their range. It was just a test run, so I didn’t care. I just wanted to see one bandit get a bunch of new holes added to their body.

Then I started time once again.