Save State Hero 3 -ch 19-

Chapter 19

Edmund peered down the massive hole Iren had dug. It seemed nearly identical to the first hole she’d dug, just in a slightly different position.

In the end, despite their best efforts, the hole she’d burrowed down had missed the mark slightly. Enough to through off the coordinates they needed, but not enough to be a true issue.

Because they had to reset the Save-state anyways.

“Got it! Haha, this is totally triple-zero,” Iren called up, however Edmund could detect a ‘but’ coming. “But uh… there’s… a wall here. Like… an actual wall. It’s made out of steel I think? Maybe? I dunno. Really fucking heavy, really fucking hard.”

There was a deep thudding boom that drifted up from the hole. Edmund most certainly couldn’t see down to the bottom of it, but he could guess she’d just punched or kicked it in her human form.

“Really hard. Hard enough that I think I could wail on it endlessly for a while and not make any progress at all,” Iren yelled up. “I didn’t even dent this shit.”

Edmund stared down the hole. Not sure how to handle this news at all.

He had most certainly not expected there to be a wall that far done, nor for it to be so sturdy that a Dragon couldn’t smash a hole in it. It wasn’t as if Iren was a weak Dragon anymore, either. There was more than an ample amount of proof that she could go toe-to-toe with most dragons out there.

“Alright… uh… well… I’m genuinely not really sure what to say about that,” Edmund shouted down the hole. “Does it seem like there’s the possibility of a door? Does it have any seams or does it appear like it would have some elsewhere?”

“I dunno. It’s a big steel wall, Teddy hon,” shouted Iren upward with a laugh. “Wanna get into my hole and see if you can knock the walls around?”

Alina, twitched, turned her head, and looked at Edmund.

“Teddy, I know I’m not exactly one to comment here but… how… often do you… with Iren?” Alina asked, her rather full lips starting to form a pout already.

Her pouts were weaponized by this point often paired with slightly raised eyebrows, a position that emphasized her figure and looks, and left Edmund feeling as if he had to agree. To give Alina anything and everything.

Ellie had a similar power over him though it was more in line with just general care to make sure she didn’t give herself down to a stump.

Which in turn made him want to give Ellie anything and everything.

Turning his head he looked to Ellie on his left.

She had wide eyes that almost looked like they were ready to be fallen in to. As if she were about to forgive him, give him a smile, and encourage him to do what he needed for Alina.

Ah shit, what now?

This is the sequel to them fighting for attention.

Adeena said don’t get involved. Don’t get involved.

Let them… let them do this and let them… have fun… or something.

Shit.

Now Harper’s gonna show up or something or Dot and— yep, nope.

Let’s see that wall.

“Uh… should… look down the hole,” Edmund said, gesturing at the wide hole.

Off to the side, Farady and Cashatok were still working on their holes. They’d been recruited and paid with winning races to earn money for themselves.

All the dirt and rocks that were being pulled out by the Dragons were being immediately carted off to be added or built into new defenses. Apparently the other holes were going to be turned into bunkers and garrisons for individuals to utilize as it would be protected under ground.

Edmund had already suspected that they’d expand further outward as well but that wasn’t his problem.

“Running away?” Harper asked from the side of Alina.

“Yes. Yes I am,” Edmund said without a shred of false ego in his words. Then he realized he had an easy exist.

And someone to blame.

“Adeena told me to just let you all fight this out,” he offered up as an apology with a smile. “I’ll just listen to Fate and not get involved directly.

“What I will say is I did promise Harper I’d have dinner with her tonight since I had dinner with Ellie last night though. Beyond that… uhm… Iren, any chance you can come pick me up?”

“Already here! Haha!” Iren’s crowed as her head popped out of the hole. She simply lunged forward, caught him up in her mouth, turned around in her hole, and started scuttling down it at high speed.

“Holy shit I’m in your mouth,” Edmund got out in a stupid sounding tone as she carried him down the hole.

“I was this morning too! And yesterday morning. Haha, you didn’t mind it then?” asked Iren, her tongue movnig around against his waist and legs as she spoke.

“You’re not half as funny as you think you are,” he countered.

“Yes I am. I’m damn hilarious. Might as well call me Lickitung because I can damn well paralyze you with my tongue attack,” teased Iren even as she carried him deeper into the dark. “You can’t even stand up when I’m done.”

“I… you… yeah. Yeah,” Edmund allowed with a nod of his head. “You do and yeah… I can’t stand up.”

Iren laughed loudly and then came to a slow stop. Only to literally spit him out.

“I know I don’t normally spit, but I can’t swallow you this time,” Iren apologized, let out a strange girlish giggle in Dragon form, and then shifted to her human self. Hitting the hard stone next to him with a soft thump. “Okay, this it. See? Feels like steel.”

Edmund’s helmet had somehow brightened everything for him once he’d stood up and he could see exactly what Iren was talking about. It was indeed a large metal plate that was partially revealed in the hole they were in.

The reason they knew this was 0, 0, 0 was they’d consulted with the Log above to ask if Iren was at the correct coordinates. She had been at the time.

Which made the strange steel place even more odd.

“Oz, what am I looking at here?” he asked and lifted a hand to run his gauntleted fingers across the smooth surface. It did indeed feel a lot like steel.

Lifting his hand, he wrapped on it several times.

It gave off a much thinner sounding clunk than he expected.

To the point that Edmund swore it sounded hollow in a way.

“I don’t know,” stated Oz with an odd note of curiosity. “I have no idea what it is. It shouldn’t be there, whatever it is. It doesn’t show up in any known archive of information I have access to.”

“Before you ask, I don’t know either,” Srit offered up, sounding far more than curious, but actually scared. “I’ve notified Runner and Ryker both. Neither can come investigate but both are now deeply curious. To the point that Ryker blew something up on accident.”

Edmund felt cold.

Deeply, terrifyingly, cold.

If this was something that Srit, Oz, Runner, and Ryker, didn’t know about, than it was something that existed in a way beyond everything Edmund knew. Something that he didn’t actually want to deal with.

Yet, he realized he needed to.

This was the point at which Zeus had set up his own vault, side by side next to this strange metal wall. It meant it had a different possibility than something pre-Runner or pre-Ryker.

It belonged to Zeus.

Chewing at his lip, Edmund contemplated on what to do about this wall.

Thinking on it, he knew he needed to get through this wall. Needed to get to whatever was on the inside. Standing there, sucking on his teeth, Edmund really didn’t know how to get that done though.

Then he snapped his fingers as a stupid thought popped into his head.

He already knew how to get in.

It was literally how he was planning to get into Zeus’ vault after all. All he had to do was the same thing, just slightly different.

“Didja figure it out? Don’t need a thinky blow job this time?” Iren asked with a purr in her voice. She’d sidled up behind him and was dragging her nails along the pauldrons of his Legionnaire armor. Then drummed her fingers in a drum roll once. “Or do you need one anyways?”

“We’ll just step back through at whatever the coordinates are beyond that wall after we raid Zeus vault. I mean, it makes sense,” he said and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not like we have to remain in that world once we do it.”

“That assumes we can leave the vault,” Iren put in as she pressed up to his armored back. “Is that a good assumption to make?”

“Probably not but it’s the only idea I’ve got on how to get in there,” Edmund grumbled and thumped on the door with the back of his hand again. It once more sounded suspiciously hollow to him. “You made it seem like you weren’t going to get through it after all.”

“I… yeah, I’m not getting through that,” Iren agreed. “It seems as if it’s not just a material thing but more magical or some nonsense. Like it’s not supposed to open to anyone.”

Edmund grunted at that, then hesitated. He looked upward toward the top of the hole.

“Alina dear, I’ll pop my helmet off for you to get a drink if you bring the Log down to me?” he called upward.

“Coming!” Alina shouted down the hole followed by a strange noise.

Then silence.

“Pretty sure she just took the log straight out of Dot’s hands without even asking,” Iren murmured with a chuckle. “It’s a shame I don’t get to remember it, but in the same breath, it’s kinda fun that it’s always new and interesting to me. That and I get the impression you kinda lean on me because I forget it all.”

Blinking, Edmund couldn’t argue that fact.

“I do,” he stated with absolute simplicity.

It was the truth.

There was a loud fluttering noise followed by Alina simply appearing in front of him. She had a wide smile on her pretty face that exposed her elongated canines. In her hands was the log and she was practically vibrating in place.

Anyone looking at her would have assumed she hadn’t eaten anything in days given the way she’d appeared for his offer. Yet he’d fed her this morning.

“Alright, thank you, Dev,” Edmund whispered and took the Log from her. “Just give me a second to ask it a few questions and we’ll get my helmet off. Down here or up there, either way.”

“Of course, of course,” Alina said with a rich and throaty laugh. Her eyes flicked from Edmund to Iren. “Iren, all you need to know is you bring all of us joy even if you don’t remember it. You’re a friend of mine and I don’t have many of those. Honestly, until all this happened, it was just Dot.

“Now I have you, Harper, Ellie, and Adeena as my friends. Teddy… is my friend too but you get it, I’m sure.”

“Oh definitely, haha,” Iren agreed.

Edmund tapped in his question simply after stepping away from Alina and Iren. He put the steel wall directly in front of himself.

What’s in front of me?

“Unlisted material. It has no name.”

What is it surrounding?

“Vigil of the Reliquary.”

Blowing out a slow breath, Edmund had no idea what that was, but it sounded important. Very important. It made him feel like whatever it was, was a place that would allow him to look over relics. Or something along those lines, but one could never tell with deities.

Shaking his head he hesitated, then finally entered his next question.

How do I get inside the Vigil of Reliquary?

“State your full and true name and request access.”

With a flinch, Edmund shook his head, pulling face away from the Log as if it were a live snake. One that had just hissed at him and reared back as if ready to strike. That the way to access it was literally stating his name.

“What’s wrong?” Iren asked, sounding rather nervous. “That seems like a good thing? Don’t you want access?”

“It’s because it means that once again he was fore-ordained,” whispered Alina. “That he can go where even the gods do not. That he is unique and universal.

“Yet he’s also mortal.

“It’s a true conundrum and I can certainly understand why he is so leery about it. Why it would give him pause. I felt very similar when I was converted into a vampire just after finishing high-school.”

Clicking his tongue, Edmund looked at the wall.

“I’m uh… I’m Edmund I. Strator and I request access,” he tried, then winced, shook his head and cleared his throat. “That is, I’m Edmund Isaac Strator and I request access to the Vigil of the Reliquary.”

There was a single instance where Edmund stood there and then the next he wasn’t in the hole with Alina or Iren anymore. He was standing inside of a room that was as bright as if it had been lit by the sun. There was no light source however, and the shadows were all straight down beneath everything.

Including Edmund.

As he stood there he looked around at the interior and tried to piece together what he was looking at.

There were a number of mirrors all across one of the walls. Set together to form a perfect wall of silvered surfaces that had no edge at all they were so closely pressed. The only reason Edmund to see that they weren’t all one piece, was the faintest line between them that ran in gridlines.

The other three walls had strange swirling and shifting of what looked to be places and people. Of locations and individuals that were clearly not anywhere near one another.

Spread throughout the room, which was roughly sixty feet by sixty feet, were tables, chairs, all of them cleared and without a single item upon them. Not even dust or debris.

There was a doorway that seemed to lead out of this location as well.

“Oz?” Edmund tried.

There was no response.

“Srit? Runner? Ryker? Uh… Zeus?” he fired off rapidly. Wondering if anyone would respond to him at all. There was the distinct possibility that no one could reach or hear him at all.

“Right,” Edmund said to himself and pulled up his Save-state system.

Surprisingly, he found his ability came to him readily, but also, with a great deal more than it ever had before.

Spread out before him were an infinite number of Save-states that were red, blue, purple, and a slew of them that were green.

He had never seen green before.

When he touched one of those he found it was strange.

The person it belonged to had a line of Save-states that stretched out and beyond where Edmund began his existence. It ran all the way back.

All the way back to when all of the Save-states began in this world, in fact. There were tens of thousands of individuals here with green Save-states.

Edmund immediately flicked it away.

He most certainly didn’t need to go prodding around into the people who had existed at the start of this world. At the start of what was likely existence itself by his reckoning.

People like Runner and Ryker who became deities.

Which might even be why they were all green instead of blue and red in fact.

No, looking into this would only give Edmund more worries, more problems, and more things to fret over.

When his place in the world was already a question mark that he couldn’t answer, he really didn’t want to add to his own problems. There were enough mysteries around him already.

Dismissing his Save-states Edmund didn’t know quite what to do with himself.

A sudden and heavy boom sounded from off to his left.

Edmund smirked at what had likely just happened.

He had been standing with Alina and Iren, then vanished. Leaving them both standing in the hole, likely right on the other side of this wall.

Moving over to where he’d heard the rather loud thud, he lifted up his hand and slammed on the wall five times in the ever classic ‘shave-and-a-hair-cut’ beat.

To which of course, Iren hit the wall twice with ‘two-bits’.

As idiotic as it might be, it just established that yes, Edmund was inside, and yes, he was fine. On top of that, they’d determined the exact spot that those two were at.

Walking along the wall, Edmund began dragging his hand along it. His goal was to find if there was an entry point. He didn’t think there was but he at least wanted to try.

As he went, he began tapping at the wall, the Dragon and the Vampire in the hole would likely hear him walking away. Knocking as he went.

Edmund knew he was delaying actually poking around.

Looking around.

Asking questions of the Log directly about this location.

Yet ni the same breath, he needed time.

Needed a moment.

A minute.

Just to let his mind catch up with the fact he was now somewhere that even the gods couldn’t go, and he suddenly had the ability to see a great many Save-states, that he probably shouldn’t be able to see.

Edmund trailed along the wall, his armored fingers moving along the hardened material.