57 – Selling to the highest bidder

There was a listing in the deep web, about someone having acquired data in a not very legal manner from a major conglomerate, data that was being sold at an online auction in less than five hours. Curiously, around the same time as that announcement, a big piece of news began to circulate among the hacker groups. News that was being silenced and was utterly absent from mainstream media too, a fact that in the hacker circles meant that the deed was of the most juicy variety.

Someone had stolen something, what it was not clear, directly from AQ in broad daylight, without anyone noticing. As time passed, more information about the listing began to emerge. It emerged only as rumors, of course, as was the usual way with these things. No official confirmations, because any statement of that kind would be an official admission of guilt that no hacker could afford to give. Rumors were as good as actual news at hacker auctions though, and sometimes even better.

The auction was held entirely in the virtual space, a sort of astral space like the world between worlds, except that this was a world within a world. The virtual as an emergence of some computational substrate present in the world of Terrigenesis, perhaps even running on AQ proprietary hardware. Melina, Lisette and Ishrin were all present to the auction, taking the form of extravagant virtual avatars made and tailored specifically for events like this. Lisette was the most fascinated by this tech of all three, making her desire to learn it even stronger.

Eventually a buyer was selected, and it was time to meet them in person. This was going to be the second favor being spent from Mekano, Ishrin thought, or perhaps it still fell within the bounds of the first. It didn’t really matter much at this point because he pretty much had to go through with it now, or the girls –Melina most of all – were going to go utterly ballistic on him. Not to worry, it was just a minor detour. And delay. But the delay only stung insofar as Melina was concerned, so this was a tradeoff whose price she was the one who would end up paying.

“Something’s odd.” Ishrin said, after having scouted the abandoned warehouse in search of anything out of place. “I don’t like this.”

“There’s nothing here.” Melina said, she too having completed a scouting of the place. “But if you say we abort, we abort.”

Ishrin shook his head. “I don’t know. On one hand, I should trust my gut. On the other hand, if we back out now it’s going to be a nightmare for both us and Mekano. We would have to convince everyone that we really have the goods, and to do so would be to expose us to even more danger than here. I say we risk it. We do have superior firepower, after all.”

In hindsight, this was the point where it all went wrong beyond recovery. The thought that since they were magical and had magical senses and magical weaponry, they were better than their technological counterparts.

Melina nodded. “Mana checks?”

“Right,” Ishrin said. “I’m at 90%”

“Around the same as well.” Melina said.

“I am at maximum capacity.” Lisette said.

The convoy arrived exactly on time. Five cars, all black with their windows tinted as to obscure their contents slid into the parking lot without a sound. All but one stood there unmoving, while from the car at the head of the convoy three men in black suits emerged with practiced composure. They looked around, securing the perimeter around the lot, guns drawn. Once they were satisfied with their checks, one of them went to the back of the car and opened the door, letting the real buyer out of the reinforced steel protection of the vehicle.

To the eye of a local, and even more to Mekano’s, she was a stunning woman. Clad in a blazing red dress that defied wind and light itself, shining fabric fluttering in the wind but refusing to get wet under the incessant rain. As did her hair, flowing like an amorphous black ooze around her carefully sculpted pale face and red lips. Too bad it was all by Terrigenean standards, of course, which did nothing to suggest beauty to any of the three visitors to the planet. Where there should have been hair there were actually feathers, and where should have been pale jade skin were scales that shimmered in their almost transparency. There were no lips but a beak at the center of it all. But Ishrin liked to think of the woman as beautiful, as he knew she was by local standards.

He slotted the small gem into the socket at the center of the ritual circle.

[Ritual successful: Danger Detector. Danger level: 48]

He nodded, to which both Melina and Lisette nodded back. Mekano also flashed them with his laser from afar, watching them through the scope of his sniper rifle. The danger level was not very high, which contrasted even further with Ishrin’s gut feeling.

“I feel it too.” Melina reassured him. “I think it’s due to the fact that we are not used to this.”

Ishrin nodded, but his eyebrow twitched. While the statement was true for her, it wasn’t really the same with him. He knew how these deals went, and he knew it well.

Stepping out of seemingly nowhere, Ishrin and only Ishrin appeared before the lone woman. The terms of the deal were simple: one-on-one. Left unsaid was the fact that it was up to each party to fool the other, to make it look like they were alone when in fact, they were not. They both knew what would happen should one of them be caught red-handed. And thus, both did their checks before they even greeted each other, showing how both were experts in their own right at these kinds of dealings.

“You the buyer?” Ishrin finally broke the silence.

The woman nodded. “Man of few words, aren’t you?”

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

“Not usually, no.” Ishrin flashed his teeth. “Only when I need to.”

The woman’s smile was ensnaring. “Let’s get to business, shall we?”

With a snap of her fingers, a man appeared from the shadows. It was one of the men Ishrin saw leave the cars, and he was carrying a black case chained to his wrist. There was no visible chrome on him, no augmentations. He examined the contents of the briefcase, still attached to the man. There was a thumb drive inside, supposedly filled with money.

“Not so quick.” The woman interrupted him before he could extend his hand to pick the thumb drive up. “Your side of the deal. Show me that you indeed possess what you claim to have on you.”

“I’ll show you a magic trick.” Ishrin said, with a bow and some smoke for effect, and suddenly the whole warehouse was filled to the brim with technology. The exact same contents of the room he emptied at the AQ tower now laid strewn across the damp concrete, crushing the few plants that managed to grow through the cracks in the floor with the weight of the server racks.

The woman did not react to the provocation. Whatever she was thinking she did not show. She simply looked around, nodded, and instructed her grunt to release his hold on the briefcase.

“I have seen enough.” She said all of a sudden, unprompted.

Then all hell broke loose.

The reason why, upon seeing magic being used to materialize a roomful of servers out of thin air, the woman had not reacted was multifaceted. There was one assumption that could be made, and that was erroneously made there by Ishrin. He thought that she thought he might have used some sort of holographic technique to hide the servers that were already there in the first place. Making the warehouse appear empty when it was in fact not empty.

This was not the case. The actual truth was that there were agents on Terrigenesis who were more familiar with the existence of magic than Ishrin thought. Never in his decades long stay in the past did it ever occur to him that such people existed here, which meant that they were either very secretive or that their appearance was a new thing. If the latter was the case, then the probability that his own actions prompted them to recognize the existence of supernatural phenomena, and by extension his own existence, was not zero.

There was a time and place for thinking and there was a time and place for acting. This was the latter kind of place, as a loud explosion finally set everything in motion. It was Mekano, shooting the first shot from the apparent safety of his hiding spot, blasting the head of a concealed enemy agent clean off. In the span of a few moments, both countless other agents – black suited men and scant few samurais in their midst – and Ishrin’s team converged to the warehouse and engaged in a fierce battle.

None of the two parties seemed to care about the equipment that up until a few moments ago was the central focus of everything that was happening. Shots, bursts of magic, katanas, grenades. Everything was done with the intent to kill and wound and capture, with no regards for the invaluable servers and their data, the secrets that were being lost to the destruction of the hardware that housed them, and the patents revealing the dark motives of AQ inside of them.

It was just a battle for supremacy. Magic was being used sparingly, with the constraints that being in a world like this forced upon the mages. On the other side, no punches were being pulled. When it was clear that there was no way out except extreme violence, however, Ishrin and team became extremely more fierce and began using all the tools at their disposal with much more abandon. They were powerful adventures from another world, and it was soon clear that they could keep their ground even against overwhelming numbers of samurais and mercenaries. Dancing nimbly in and out of the shadows, shooting deadly bullets of green magic or blue trails, weaving like death itself through the ranks of the samurais with twin flying blades in tow.

At the first sign of an opening, the team gathered around Ishrin for their retreat. Their plan was to teleport to Mekano in one swift hop and then burn all their collective mana to put as much distance between them and the warehouse as possible. Perhaps even a thousand kilometers, if the girls managed to be efficient in the fight. And the plan, which had been tested and refined to account for all sorts of problems that could arise when going up against both magical and technological threats, was about to go off without a hitch.

Except for when said hitch halted its execution dead.

This time it was not a gut feeling. No. Ishrin’s gut literally screamed at him as a hundred-ton tungsten rod was released from a satellite hovering above the warehouse, 150 kilometers in the sky. He dropped everything that he was doing and instead of finishing his ritual his hands shot upwards. He grabbed the accelerating rod falling from the sky with his telekinesis, struggling and dropping to his knees. He gave it all he had, and slowly the rod first stopped accelerating, then stopped altogether until he managed to break it into pieces and had it fall harmlessly down on the planet to burn up in the atmosphere.

When he finally allowed himself to look around, he saw that everybody was completely still.

The fight was on hold. Paused. Frozen. Of all the people present, the most dangerous was Lisette, coiled up like a spring. Ready to explode again.

“They took Mekano.” Melina’s voice cut through the tense atmosphere.

“Wh—”

Then everyone was suddenly gone, as were the servers. All that was left in the warehouse were Ishrin, Melina and Lisette. And the aftermath of the battle, the only thing that could testify that the fight really happened and was not just a figment of their collective imagination.

You can find story with these keywords: Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist, Read Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist, Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist novel, Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist book, Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist story, Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist full, Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist Latest Chapter