53 – Discarded memorabilia

Making their way to the ground floor was easy once they hacked the elevator. Liù eventually proved to be the superior piece of technology hacking the security of the elevator and granting them full access to all parts of the surprisingly tall and deep building. Perhaps it was due to the fact that the building had no internal security, or due to the ritual, or maybe it was Liù who was simply that good. There was no way to know because, when asked how she did it, she simply said:

I have no idea :P

With their full level of access, had they been interested in anything else other than getting out they could have done a great deal of damage to the corporation. Perhaps it was for the best that they had no idea about what AQ did (beyond what they had seen in the production line of the floor). Mekano would bite his claws out if he knew just how easily they could have accessed all the secrets of the largest conglomerate of this continent, and that they instead chose to simply walk out of it.

As it was, once they reached the ground floor, Ishrin and team simply greeted the guards and the mercenary security force like they belonged, were greeted at in turn, passed under a scanner and left. The scanner was not made to detect magic, and Liù was simply too alien a system to be detected it seemed.

The AQ Headquarters building was located in the busiest, densest and brightest part of the city. The roads were large, 5-lane highways filled with vehicles moving at a snail’s pace under the rain. Above, powerful electric lights simulated the brightness of day. Motorists riding nimble electric motorcycles danced around the still traffic, and large trucks towered over the smaller luxury cars of the select elite of the city. Under the maze of concrete overpasses and electric lights, the darkness of the undercity was a palpable, stark difference. The clean streets and colorful yellow bollards, the large sidewalks and the many stores and shops left place to a grimy, wet and dull sprawl, the colors washed away by countless rains and by the passage of time. The waste of the upper levels collected here, along with what little natural life could still grow in the concrete expanse of the city, fed by the chemicals and the ever present light percolating from above.

It was a barren land of sharp lines and edges, where the foundations of the great skyscrapers dug into the landscape of the city below, forcing its shapes and its confines. Squeezed between the concrete pylons and the pyramid-shaped walls, tiny passageways covered in lichen and yellowing moss snaked in and out of the dark recesses of the below. It was only at times that they could see the sky and be exposed to incessant gelid rain that fell from the grey expanse of formless clouds above.

The party was making their way towards the outskirts of the megacity. It was there, Ishrin said, that they could find Mekano, hiding away somewhere like a sewer rat. He didn’t know where exactly and had no real plan on how to actually find him beyond just casting a ritual and hoping it worked. There were problems with using magic in this world, he knew, and soon it would become evident to the rest of his party as well.

As she walked, Melina was pondering over their encounter with the woman in the storage closet at the AQ building. “I thought they would all speak with that strange accent and cadence like Mekano does.”

Ishrin laughed. “Hahaha no, only Mekano has that tic.”

Melina was perplexed. “Why?”

“What do you mean why? He’s just like that!”

“No.” She wasn’t buying it. “There’s gotta be a reason he’s all… you know.” She said and made a weird gesture around her head.

“All wonky and stuff? A stroke, I think. Or if you believe him, he stuck his head in a particle accelerator during a heist job. Don’t know about you, but it sounded a bit like he was tooting his own horn. Beak? Yeah, he has a beak so let’s go with beak.”

Lisette shook her head at the exchange, but she also exhaled through her nostrils in the classic fashion of somebody suppressing a laugh, to which Ishrin replied with a cheeky smile. It was only after some more walking, what felt like hours of walking but could have been just five minutes due to the party’s accelerated pace, that she spoke.

“Ishrin. I am hungry.” She said, and her face was contorted in a grimace.

Ishrin hummed. “Huh.”

“Me too, actually.” Melina said.

“Huh. To be fair I too feel a bit of an appetite. How strange that all three of us—” he paused, “but of course! There is no magic in the atmosphere of this world. Can you feel it? Like the air is thinner?”

You are reading story Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist at novel35.com

He knew all about the magic situation already before coming here, despite him not realizing that hunger would have been a side effect, which is why he was overly worried about how he was going to find Mekano without a ritual. It wasn’t that rituals were impossible to perform, the one he did back at the AQ HQ was proof of it, but it was going to take a much longer time to recover from the mana expenditure. There was no magic in the air to nourish their magically enhanced bodies, and this made them burn extra energy to create mana internally. Hence why, despite being Tier 11 and beyond, they were all hungry.

They stopped to eat, picking the most mana-rich foods that Ishrin happened to have in his inventory. In truth, he hadn’t packed for the occasion, because he was not used to having this problem. The last time he hopped to a world like this that had no ambient mana, he was being supplied across dimensions by his own personal mana generator back at his base in Eternia. Now all that was gone, or at the very least inaccessible. The keeper mentioned that Ishrin was never to return to Eternia, but he was sure as hell going to try. When he had the power to do it, of course. For now he could not even find Eternia when scanning the multiverse, so far away it was.

They walked much slower afterwards, opting to save as much energy as possible. Adventurers of high tier could walk so fast as to be faster than fighter jets if they wanted, even without aids like Ishrin’s boots emulating cultivator techniques, but doing so consumed mana. Instead, they just walked normally, and all of a sudden the city became alive around them.

“This place is so strange.”

Melina looked at a corner of a road, where under a blinking phosphor light a group of five people were all huddled together around a small fire in a tin can. She took in their extravagant clothes, their colorful hairstyles (a sight so strange to see on avian/lizard hybrids) and their technological augments. Some wore contact lenses that lit up at times, others had entire limbs made of chrome (this was the local term for the augmented bio-mechanical limbs) and others were so transformed that she couldn’t dare call them Terrigenean anymore.

“This is what runaway technological development does when applied to a disordered post-capitalistic society.” Ishrin mused.

This of course begged the question of whether the guild was doing a good thing back on Prima Luce, preserving the status quo, or not. A question that became increasingly harder to answer the more the group ventured in the less well-off parts of the city. There they saw it: the drugs, the killings, the kidnappings. Happening in broad daylight. And there they saw their first glimpse of the samurais, with their war chrome and their gigantic weapons, mixed with a reimagining of the classical weapons Lisette and Melina were used to seeing, but corrupted and changed by technology like it was a sickness.

For a moment they wondered if they should intervene, but the debate was quickly brought to an end when Ishrin told them that it wasn’t a good idea. Sighting a small logo on the black cars that were departing with a screech of tires, he narrowed his eyes. Two letters, all too familiar. AQ. And he wondered whether the others had seen the letters, whether they knew.

“It would be like a god stepping on an ant, yes.” He explained when Melina protested that since they were so powerful they could so some good without too many repercussions. She didn’t see the logo, he decided. “But these are just street thugs. We would be wasting a limited resource, magic, on street thugs while at the same time making it known to the actually dangerous agents of this world – and there are many, trust me – that a magic user is roaming around their planet. Do you have an idea what they do to magic users here?”

Melina shook her head.

“Me neither. And I don’t want to find out.” Ishrin walked on ahead, but now his mind was filled with images of tortured mages, dissected and cut into pieces to study them, their bodies, their biology in search of what made them tick. In search of that secret ingredient that made them more than normal sentient beings. That made them superhuman. (And from here on, he decided to call all sentient beings humans no matter if they were made of flesh, scales or silicon for ease of thought).

It was morning when they reached the outskirts of the city. The clouds had not parted, although the rain had subsided and left the world a grey formless mess. From the rocky hills, where the sand didn’t seem to have been wet by the incessant rain of the night, the city in the distance was like a looming giant made of dark spires and spikes, enveloped in fog.

Liù left her favorite pocket to look into the distance, joining the others.

It’s sooooo gloomy! Why is there no sun?

“The sun? This world hasn’t seen the light of the sun in a hundred years. Ever wondered why there are no plants? ‘Cause they all grow inside, lit by artificial electric lights, stacked in neat little rows underground. Look at the city. Even gloomier still. That fog enveloping it is man-made, just like the clouds. That’s why it never goes away.” Ishrin explained. “They do use electric cars on the roads now, but it doesn’t matter when the AQ building alone spews more fumes than a coal power plant. T’Ron was a city of heavy industry rather than digital services back then, and now New T’Ron isn’t any lesser.”

Melina took in the view. “You seem to know an awful lot about this place.”

“Lived forty years here. Feels like an eternity ago.”