Chapter 12: Chapter V9: Light Research

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“You think the protests are connected?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out. Especially since we've tracked one person we suspect to be part of Retribution in the crowds. There's no way it isn't, I'd bet my entire bourbon collection on it. Personally, I’d like to curb stomp the protestors and send them packing, but we can’t revoke their protest license without triggering a massive reaction.” 

“So we just let them stay?”

“Unless you've got a better idea? Plus there's a chance we might pick up some new leads on Retribution if we find more of these devices."

“I understand that, but trying to search a crowd that large using mana sense just isn't feasible." 

"I'm aware Cooper. Luckily for us, they thought they were clever by masking the jammers using the density of the crowds to throw off our senses. Unfortunately for them, the Maridium they stole to make these lil contraptions, leaves a black hole in our Mana sense so-" 

"We look for the areas that are distorted!" 

"Precisely, by trying to mask the Mana signature they've inadvertently given us a way to circumvent their entire camouflage system. The bad part is they've made these things so fucking small, we'll have to canvas the areas inch by inch, and there's a chance that whoever set these devices up could still be nearby since they need to be remotely activated." 

"In a dense crowd, that wouldn't be ideal for trying to subdue them."

"Won't be a problem, they wouldn't risk exposing themselves or endangering civilians if they've spent this long sneaking about. They'll probably try to run the moment we find a device, so let our people know via hardline to keep an eye out and keep it hushed, no telling who could be in on it."

"Aye, aye boss."

- General Judge Patel of the Oathkeepers, discussing disarming communication jammers in the city with gathered Mediators

Chapter V9: Light Research.

After tidying up the house, Jack lay staring at the clock duct-taped to his ceiling for several hours, pondering what he was going to do. It was already One-fifteen A.M. with the family day/Birthday celebration ending about three hours ago. Yet Jack couldn’t muster up the energy to play video games as per his regular routine. 

 

He was worried, with anxiety creeping along his skin like an annoying tick. The blue box was still within the corner of his eyes and despite eating several helpings of stew, Jack was still hungry.

 

Jack tossed and turned, racking his brain for ways to potentially get out of being drafted into some hardcore militant training and potentially having to fight. The slim chance he would have to fight and face Horrors was enough to shake him to his core. 

 

Jack knew he was a coward, that he was a no-good NEET. Hell, his entire future life goal was to inherit his biological family’s wealth and then spend it on a plot somewhere on the mid-level and stay in his room ordering take-out forever.

 

Social life? Who cares, Women? Who needed them? Jack was more than content living his life in the safety of a personal bunker, looking at porn and playing video games rather than being forced to spend his days training. He'd be lying if he said there wasn't a part of him that wanted to change, but at least this way he’d never have to deal with Angelica barking up his ass about making something of his life anymore and feeling guilty anytime he saw Mike. 

 

Plus if he got a residence near Mr.Wong's shop he’d didn’t have to worry about commuting ever again, the possibilities were limitless, yet none of that meant anything if Jack was discovered to be an Awakened. 

 

Sooner or later someone would try and come for him if he did pass training, It was only a matter of time. Thinking back on it, he could remember James occasionally moaning about the constant recruitment letters, Scouters, and companies that continuously tried to draft him into their service. Sometimes they would even show up on the front porch unannounced waiting for him outside, with Jack more than once sleepily tripping over a sitting recruiter.  It was all a hassle, not quite what he envisioned for his future.

 

Maybe he could feign sick? No, that wouldn’t work, the letter he was staring at even stated in small print that even if he was sick, he was required to report in any way.  

 

“Ugggh.” Jack moaned, growing irritated he leaped off the bed and unplugged his night light to plug in his computer. 

 

The room darkened immediately, only to flood with light as the RGBs of his device lit up. Sitting down, Jack immediately booted up the PC to try and garner more information on the E-Net.

 

Usually, most people refrained from using the E-Net to search for anything as everyone knew it was heavily monitored by the government. Luckily Jack met a guy online, who knew a guy that knew another guy that got him access to the deep web hook-up where he could pirate games. 

 

Turning on his VPN, Jack began loading the application, where hundreds of uncensored forums, chat rooms, and articles ran amok on the E-Net, unpoliced by the government, it was technically illegal to access but only if you were caught. 

 

S.y.m.p.t.o.m.s o.f. A.w.a.k.e.n.i.n.g.|

 

Jack typed out, hoping to acquire more information. Dozens to hundreds of links popped up with numerous clickbait titles like “Steps to become an Awaken!” or “Before I awakened I….” quickly flooding the screen. Since the deep web ran wild, Jack took everything he saw with a grain of salt, but something on here had to be true. 

 

So Jack went digging, clicking through hundreds of sites while ignoring the fetish porn ads that kept popping up. Most of the sites Jack visited kept asking him for a credit card to continue or fishing ads at him non-stop to the point that the process quickly began to get irritating. 

 

Several of the links seemed to have come from credible sources as they described or listed similar things that James had already told Jack but nothing really stood out in his initial search.

 

A.w.a.k.e.n.i.n.g.  N.i.g.h.t.m.a.r.e.s.|

 

Jack tried changing the search query, hoping for better results. Alas, nothing seemed to change. There was a forum talking about how the immortality of Awakens was a nightmare, while another suggested harvesting Awaken body parts to make elixirs of eternal life. This caused Jack to shudder, but he continued on hoping to find something. After an hour of browsing, he was about to cut his losses and play video games instead, when a link happened to catch his eye. 

The Nightmares of the Awaken and The Threat they Pose.

Jack opened the link, his curiosity piqued. 

 

The link took him to a webpage that had several photos and images drawn up with dates, texts, and a video with a thumbnail of a bird surrounded by stars and books, with the name STOLAS written in a bubbly font. 

 

Ignoring the blurb of text surrounding the video, Jack clicked on the play button where after a few seconds a man wearing a smiling bird mask suddenly appeared in the frame.

 

“The Factorum Slum incident, Floor sixty-nine Virus outbreak, eradication of the fourth guardsmen battalion, and the nuclear radiation leak incident of base thirteen, all of these incidents seem unrelated, but what if I were to tell you otherwise?” The man spoke, his voice coming out distorted as if being played through an autotune system.  

You are reading story Eden Theory: ArcanePunk Progression Fantasy Novel/RW at novel35.com

 

Soon the man started to animatedly describe the events and details regarding the various incidents, however, Jack had heard of several of the events that the man was describing and elected to skip ahead. 

 

Except for the fourth guardsmen battalion, Jack vaguely recalled each of the incidents, every one of them, a high casualty occurrence that had taken place within the city sometime over the course of its inception

 

Pressing fast-forward, Jack would occasionally pause and play the video to listen to see if there was any new information. He was about to chalk it up to just another rambling conspiracy theorist when suddenly the screen panned away from the man, zooming out to hundreds of photos tapped to the wall behind the man.

 

It wasn’t that there were so many photos that caught Jack’s eye, but rather what was in them. 

 

Bodies. Lots and lots of bodies.

 

The bird mask continued narrating, with the camera panning from one photo to the next, showing different scenes of various locals like suburbs, factorums, and what looked to be laboratories. All distinct places with one thing in common and that was the bloody carnage and destruction.

 

“Every incident has resulted in numerous lives lost. Unlike the Elysium Massacre, where Horrors were involved, every event that I’ve described has been the cause of manmade errors that occurred, or at least that’s what the government will tell you. But look at this image.” The man said, panning the camera to a blurry image of a man inside of a shimmering dome that appeared to be floating above a factory where numerous workers could be seen lying about.

 

“We’ve identified this man as Dominique Yor Hiller, age eighteen, metalworker. Public access documents had him listed as non-awakened, and yet! Here he is floating above a factorum. Now, the last time I checked my little chics, we regular birds can’t fly and don’t have domes of energy around them, so what's going on here?” The masked figure asked rhetorically, holding up a government-looking document with Dominique Yor Hiller as its header. The camera zoomed in on the page where a bracket for citizen classification listed the man as Non-awaken. 

 

“Now why does the government have him listed as non-awaken when he’s clearly demonstrating powers? Fishy isn’t it? But that isn’t all hatchlings!  We also have video footage of a similar instance, recovered from the helmet of a guardsman belonging to the fourth battalion. Now I can’t leak my sources, but I can confirm that this is real. I give my Stolas guarantee!” In the next moment, a video began playing, the video quality was pretty poor but the audio was crystal clear, with the sound of someone singing a song Jack recognized. 

 

“These sadistic! Critics! Can’t judge my souuul~ It’s my life I’m the one in controool~”  

 

Judging from the point-of-view and head bobbing it was obvious that the singer was whoever the camera was mounted to.  

 

 

The person was standing somewhere in what appeared to be a military outpost, singing and beating on a bucket while several other soldiers stood around doing the same. Judging from their hands and tone, the video footage was taken from a woman. 

 

Suddenly a soldier stumbled into view from in between two armored cars, looking sickly and visibility shaken, causing the woman to stop her singing. 

 

“Whoa, yo Seven, you good man?” the woman rolling the tape called out, with other soldiers putting a pause on their jam session. 

 

“C-chaplain, I need… I gotta see, AGH! I WONT! ” The soldier stammered back, suddenly letting out a cry of pain. Several nearby soldiers including the woman recording immediately jumped up to help but abruptly, they all seemed to pause. 

 

“STAY AWAY FROM ME! LEAVE ME ALONE!” The man let out a surprising shriek that was borderline inhuman. Swiping his hands around him aimlessly before his fingers began to contract to his face. In the next moment, he began clawing at his eyes until they started bleeding profusely with smoke now bellowing from his eyes as if he were burning from the inside out.

 

“Holy shit! Marco! Get the medics and notify the Sergeant! Sev you’re gonn-” The voice holding the camera said before she was cut off.

 

“MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP! ERRROR! ERRRRRO!” 

 

The woman reached out to the man, but her hand abruptly snapped back, clutching what Jack assumed to be her throat as choking sounds could be heard before the camera angle bounced downwards and her elevation shifted closer to the ground. 

 

The camera began to move erratically, with the filmer clearly in a panic as the nearby soldiers shared the same fate as her. All of them could be seen squirming around in voiceless panic as they tried to breathe, all of them, but the man named Seven. 

 

Out of nowhere, a bright light started to shine, emitting from the direction of where Seven’s feet were before the video abruptly cut to black and the masked man appeared in the frame again.

 “Hoot hoot! That disturbing scene that you’ve just seen is video footage swiped off an encrypted government drive. The man seen is Private Arlo Walon Sev, better known to his former battalion, The Lucky Seven. Ironically he was not lucky.  Age eighteen, this guardsman was listed as non-Awakened yet somehow he’s demonstrating Awaken powers!” The man yelled while pulling up the video again and rewinding it to the part where bright light had started emitting. 

“See this light? See the direction it’s coming from? Where the light and Sev’s boot connect? Why is it that everyone around Private Sev is falling to their knees, struggling to breathe, and yet Private Sev is fine?” The man appeared in the frame again, but this twirling a feather between his fingers.  

“If you guessed that Private Sev is an Awaken you’d be correct! But what are these symptoms? Why are people dropping like flies and why is the government covering it up!?  Your neighborhood Stolas has an idea, but for a low price-”

“Tsk! Seriously?!” Jack yelled in exasperation, just as he was getting interested, of course, the video would be just another scammer. Jack was inclined to believe that something was fishy with the government but now he couldn’t take the bird man seriously.  He had to admit though, the video was disturbing, but it didn’t answer any of his questions.

Annoyed, Jack clicked away, opening a new tab to begin playing his visual love novels instead to calm his nerves.

 

 

 

 

A/N 

 

2 new Illustrations were shown in Chapter 1 :3

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