Chapter 279: Chapter 258: Carnage

"System, what can be done to permanently sunder this world from Earth?" asked Serlv, after I'd given her a brief description of what I knew of the Law.

ding
Information: No information available.

"If it had a good understanding of interdimensional travel, it wouldn't have struggled to open the original portals," I pointed out. "And would likely have given them better security."

"True. System, are you able to block future portals from Earth, and to secure your means of access?"

"We should have it cut off its access to Earth, rather than secure it," I said, not immediately agreeing to the prompt that Serlv's question generated.

"Spreading Erryn's Law to Earth would provide the optimal security to this world," said Serlv.

"A minute ago, you said Harry should return home if he wished to escape it."

"I am... undecided in that regard. They have proven themselves hostile, and a capable threat. Yet imposing Erryn's will on a world that is not hers is a step too far, for as long as our hand is not forced. I merely wish to keep the System's connection open as an option."

"Fair enough," I agreed, accepting the prompt.

ding
Information: Yes.

Of course, even if we still had admin access, the System was still a computer.

"System, what is your method of..."

ding

Huh? Did it just pre-empt me?

Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates 31.781, 6.935

"Peter?" asked Serlv. "Why did you stop?"

"A foreign soul notification. But Earth souls aren't considered foreign any more, so... something new?"

Had Maximilian opened a portal home? But he'd never pinged up as a foreign soul. I suppose I could have missed it, if it popped up while the System was busy assimilating the entire planet.

Trying to get information out of the System through vocal commands would be too slow, so I shoved my hand against the control crystal instead. From the coordinates, wasn't it one of the villages south of Dawnhold?

I searched the list of control shards for foreign souls, and it came up with one. As ever, the flood of information from it was far too dense for me to parse. Especially since it all winked out seconds later.

ding
Administrative notification: Connection lost to foreign soul.

"System, did you just infect someone briefly through another portal?"

ding
Information: No.

What just happened? Should we visit those coordinates, or was it more important to make use of our administrative access here?

I pondered for a few more seconds before recalling that the information was too dense for me to parse. I hadn't thought anything of it, because that was normal, but it was normal for people who'd grown up with the System. Someone freshly infected should have very little data. Comparing what I'd just looked through to Harry's, there was no contest; the amount of information in the foreign soul's shard left Harry in the dust. It wasn't someone briefly infected; it was someone who'd lived with the System for a significant time.

We should get there and see what was happening, but not until we'd set up some defences. There were other things I wanted, like questioning it about what had happened to me and not-Blobby, but they could wait.

"System, what are the options for preventing interdimensional portals opening up here?" I asked, which was followed by a dense few minutes in which Serlv once again took over asking the questions before I broke it again out of frustration.

The System assured us it could inject a small amount of spatial affinity to collapse them as they tried to form, without causing any danger to the surroundings on either side. Then it did something really weird to its own portals, turning them inside out in a way that left the connection looking very much like my second stage [Detach]. It was like a tenuously overlaid area, that matter didn't look like it could pass through, but that was still connected somehow. It had always bothered me how my stage two severed fingers still had a blood supply despite veins not being hooked up to anything. But, importantly, it wasn't possible for something from outside the overlaid area to be pushed in and through. No more bombs.

Finally, to top off our changes, I had it reclaim the dungeon cores from Earth. There were a few hundred thousand of the things, so it was no wonder Earth didn't think they needed to trade for monster cores, if they could draw power from dungeon cores in the same way. I did leave the monster cores, though; they'd legitimately bought them off us, and I wasn't unfair.

I was probably smirking, and I could feel my tail sticking straight up. Gregory's replacement was going to be very unhappy. It wasn't great revenge, as revenge went, but I still enjoyed the smug satisfaction.

Not for long, though. We had a foreign soul to investigate.

ding
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates 31.781, 6.935

... Two foreign souls?

By the time we reached the ark entrance, it had increased to five. By the time we'd reached cruising altitude, ten, and by the time the smoke came into view, forty. None lasted longer than a minute before the System lost the connection.

"What happened here?" asked Serlv as we descended upon the burning village, the dragon erasing the flames with a flex of her mana.

And then we got close enough to make out the people. If they could be called that.

The village's single street was littered with corpses, but most of the corpses were wrong. A man had claws sprouting from his back, tearing their way through his clothing. A woman was out of proportion, her head twice the size it should have been, her limbs short and stubby. Another was apparently the source of the fire, given that it was engulfed in flames but not burning up, with a whirl of fire affinity surrounding it. What parts were still human looked gaunt, veins protruding from thinned skin. And given the foreign soul notifications, it wasn't just their bodies that had been warped. Every corpse had an abnormality of some kind, and [Eye of Judgement] simply gave up, reporting nothing other than errors.

No, not every corpse. There were a few that were normal, but none of them were human. They were beastkin, and they'd obviously died at the hands of the deformed. I saw a kid with a deep slash across his back. A pair of legs and tail with no associated corpse, the edges rough and torn. Ripped apart, or, given the lack of torso, eaten?

It was a scene of horror as bad as the Emerald Caverns. Perhaps worse; I hadn't seen any dead kids there.

... But there were no dead human kids.

I broadened my senses, utilising [Mana Sight] and [Soul Perception] to peer into buildings, and found several cowering under tables or bedclothes. I also found the man I was looking for.

It was obvious, after all. He'd outright told me he was researching monsters, and there was only one thing this could be; someone experimenting on people to make monsters.

"Maximilian did this," I stated with complete certainty.

If bloody Earth hadn't picked right then to blow up the System, perhaps we could have caught him before this happened.

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"Where is he?" asked Serlv, her voice as cold as it had been back in the Ruby Plains.

I pointed at one of the huts that had yet to catch alight, but I needn't have bothered. He was walking out on his own, leaving a kid in there. From the way the child was lying unmoving on the floor, he was probably unconscious, but at least he was alive.

The murderer stepped out into the street and gave every impression of being pleased to see us.

"Don't you think that's interesting?" he asked, gesturing at the nearest beastkin corpse. "The delivery vehicle infected them without issue, as far as I can tell, but even the variant modified to be faster acting was completely ineffective at overwriting their DNA. It's almost as if it's externally stabilised somehow. Tell me, are the beastkin of this world artificial creations?"

Did he seriously expect me to answer? There was only one answer I'd give, and it didn't involve words.

My arm locked up, the flame grenade I'd pulled from [Inventory] stuck in my rigid hand, and he was too far away to hit him by detonating it here. Damn.

But this time, [Eye of Judgement] showed it as a status effect, with a one minute duration. Interesting; his invisible paralysis weapon had been recognised and subsumed by the System.

"Oops. Still just as violent and impulsive as the last time we met, I see. A pity; I have so much to share with you, and I'd hoped that killing me once would have worked that anger out of your system."

He turned from me to Krana.

"Thankfully, the natives are neither violent nor impulsive. A terrible disease seems to have broken out here. I'm investigating, but we should keep others away in case it spreads. Please could you set up a quarantine around this area? Get him out of here as well, before he gets infected."

Krana responded by proving that his flame breath really could be used on a person.

I watched my first death with [Soul Perception], as soul detached from body, then seemed to be sucked away, in the same way that mana was drained out of the air on Earth. Would he reincarnate again with memory intact? If so, on which world? Was his threat over?

"Peter?" demanded Serlv, when I failed to visibly respond, flame grenade still in hand. "Are you safe?"

"A paralysis status effect," confirmed Krana, hitting me with [Athena's Insight] and ripping straight through [Secrecy], which at least gained a level for its trouble. "He will be fine in a minute."

Maximilian's final moments explained exactly how he'd moved around so quickly. Unlike me, he was fully prepared to abuse the Law, lying through his teeth to convince others to help him. He'd have had no trouble whatsoever gathering information, and doubtless had been using the portal network. He may even have found people to help him with this experiment, whatever it was, although I couldn't see anyone else around. We'd need to check the corpses for anyone who didn't live in the village.

And then he'd tried it on the dragons. The recently freed dragons. The paralysis was the only thing preventing me from breaking down in hysterics.

Had I not followed through with Serlv's request, that encounter would have ended very differently, and badly for me. And not only me, either. How many more villages would he have done this to? What was his goal?

"Thank you," was the only response I could give once the paralysis wore off.

Krana snorted. "You are welcome, yet many lives have been lost here, and many orphans created. Were he not permitted to roam free, this could have been averted."

Yes, it could. The comment about orphans was a concern, though.

"Not all of what he said was necessarily lies. He mentioned a 'delivery vehicle'. The corpses may well be infectious, and given that it killed every adult in the village so quickly, the endurance stat is obviously not a protection."

My status did not show that I was diseased. Yet. Maybe I should evacuate, and hope that if it didn't infect beastkin, it wouldn't touch dragons either.

On the other hand, there were plenty of living human kids and young adults, some older than me. Maybe it only infected older people?

"We should cleanse the area, as with the rats," said Serlv, causing my brain to stutter. Had she seriously just said that?!

"There are kids still alive! I count... fifteen!"

She must have meant after evacuating them. But then, even under the Law, she'd trapped living centaurs in with the dead without hesitation...

"If this is, as you suspect, infectious, they cannot be allowed to travel. If this disease reaches a city, the effects would be catastrophic."

I stared at the dragon in disbelief, rethinking some of my earlier opinions on freeing her. Yes, there was logic to her words, but she couldn't just... murder kids.

"We don't even know they're infectious!" I snapped back.

"And how do you propose we find out? The fatality rate appears to scale with age, so you are not a useful test subject. Whose life shall we risk, then? Anyone would willingly volunteer, thanks to the Law. You merely need to pick someone. Jason perhaps? His status as a [Life Arch-Mage] would offer him some advantages."

"Give the System some time to assimilate whatever it was he did. Get the children out of here and isolated—put up another one of your ice prisons if you must—then wait for the corpses to stop erroring. If the kids still don't show diseased at that point, they're probably safe."

"Probably?"

"Fine. At that point, get Jason. And maybe we should get disease resistance rings from Grover, although I doubt this counts as a disease."

As much as I wanted to yell at her, the fact was that we'd caught Maximilian in a house with one of the kids. And the transforming adults had only killed beastkin; I could see no corpses of human children.

It was a pity Krana hadn't questioned the psychopath before torching him.

[Eye of Judgement] still showed me as clean, but I didn't want to risk infection if I could help it. I used [Mana Sight] to target my [Eye of Judgement] through walls, staying far back from the village's residents, dead or alive, and the kids came back as clean, too. I didn't trust it, though; the first time Maximilian had paralysed me, the System hadn't shown anything either.

And then the kids started waking up.

"Daddy!" screamed a young girl, probably six or seven years old, rushing out of a house and towards a mutilated corpse.

"Cease your movement," demanded Serlv, summoning a wall of ice between father and daughter.

The girl didn't acknowledge Serlv's existence, instead hammering on the ice, her desperation being sufficient to blind her to the pair of dragons.

A loud sobbing came from another house.

Someone my age stepped out of a third, looking around in horror at the carnage.

This was not going to be a pleasant day.