Pov: Vik
Roman and Xiaoran moved through the gap in the hide curtain like two shadows separating themselves from wet masonry.
There was never any grand battle cry or dramatic declaration of righteous vengeance; that kind of showy behaviour was something that only theatrical young masters ever adopted, ones who had never taken five minutes to consider the acoustics of a stone chamber.
This forms part of my training, since I never teach my disciples to be bad warriors who habitually announce the name of their attack before carrying it out; rather, I train them to be true men who fight in silence to protect.
The system states, "Lina is also your disciple, for your kind information, host."
The system's voice always came into my ear and so I addressed it internally.
Vik said, "Yes, I'll train my disciples to be real men and women."
System: "Host, what if you have some disciples who identify with a different identity? You should also be considerate of that."
Vik said to the system, "Please shut up and let me get on with my aura farming."
After the system interruption I once again concentrated on Lu Xiaoran and Roman.
Thwack.
The technician collapsed. Xiaoran caught him so that his boots wouldn't scrape the grating and pulled him behind a pile of rusted reagent drums, taking his key ring in one smooth, continuous movement.
Roman, who was across the room, didn't pull the Ivory Cleaver from the sling on its back; instead he just stepped up behind the greasy alchemist who was holding the extraction forceps.
The alchemist was so completely concentrated on extracting the glowing wood-affinity root from the prisoner's abdomen that he failed to notice the huge pile of muscle blocking out the light from the overhead lantern; it was only when a massive, calloused hand—about the size of an iron skillet—slapped down over his mouth and nose that he realized something was wrong, at the same time as Roman moved his other arm under his chin.
Crack.
Roman lowered the unconscious alchemist to the floor, removed the enchanted forceps from the alchemist's spasming fingers with the care that an experienced watchmaker would exercise, and dropped the instrument into a bucket of antiseptic wash.
The two assistants standing by the table looked as if they had been turned to stone with bug-like eyes and opened their mouths to scream—when two pale-blue needles of condensed spirit shot out from my sleeve and hit their vocal nodes right in the spot. Their screams ended in wet, silent gasps as they fell to their knees and grabbed hold of their paralysed throats.
I asked you to move clear of the central floor and then stepped through the hide curtain.
Pushpa lay across my neck like a cold, indifferent mink, although one of her black ears flicked irritably when the smell of burnt tallow and bile reached us.
I was behind Chintu, who wobbled through the curtain.
Squeak.
The small green lizard moved forward in a clumsy manner using its three-foot-long body, stopped, and snuffed the air. Its huge nostrils expanded widely as they took in the foul vapour rising from the forty-eight immense glass vats.
"Host," the System's voice buzzed in my skull, its synthetic voice trembling with real, fully mechanical panic, "you are about to decompress an S-rank apex predator into an enclosed underground foundation! The mere local displacement of mass will produce a lateral seismic force of forty tons! The ceiling is going to collapse!"
'That's nonsense,' I thought to myself and shifted my gold-rimmed spectacles. 'The vaults of the Bloodborn were built with three-layer arches of dwarf masonry in order to support four thousand tons of garden soil above them; therefore, before you start talking to me about structural failure you should at least learn some elementary civil engineering.'
I tapped my fingers together, which caused the spatial compression array surrounding Chintu's spine to disappear.
CRACK-THUMP.
It wasn't an abrupt explosion but rather the dreadful and physics-defying outburst of pure, unadulterated mass.
The toddler with the three-foot scaly body disappeared and in his place solid emerald scales formed thick, interlocking plates of Cretaceous armour; his short, two-inch arms became thick, serrated claws; and in the middle of the hall there appeared a skull as large as an armoured personnel carrier, growing until its sharp dorsal ridges scraped against the sixty-foot vaulted ceiling with a dry, grinding noise.
The sulfur in his stomach set off a reaction. A deep, underground rumble spread through his ribcage and was so intense that the emerald liquid within the glass vats started to form frantic standing waves.
Chintu looked down at the first vat, which contained the four-legged lizard with the grafted human warrior arms.
The monstrous creature made of chimera, which was floating about, rose up upright and its complex eyes opened suddenly as a result of the primal terror it felt when it detected the presence of an organism that had been at the top of the food chain when the various continents of the world were still one large piece of rock.
Chintu did not roar; he was a professional.
He just opened his huge mouth, put his sharp teeth around the upper half of the reinforced glass cylinder, and bit down.
CRUNCH.
The tempered alchemical quartz, five inches thick, broke apart just as if it had been a sugar sculpture.
Chintu tilted back the huge head of his own and let the three thousand gallons of sour bile flow out through the spaces between his teeth just as surplus soup broth does, then swallowed the lizard-beast the size of a carriage in two wet, rhythmic gulps.
A satisfied, rumbling gurgle came from his throat and was then followed by a small puff of black sulfur smoke which drifted up towards the ventilation grates.
I said to Lina, stepping round the puddle of bile that had spilled without allowing any of it to reach the hem of my white linen robes, "Catalog the intake rate and let's find out whether synthetic flesh-grafts cause gastric distress in Cretaceous digestive tracts."
Lina whispered, "Recording, Master," as she moved her fingers rapidly over her brass tablet from her position on the catwalk. "The subject's stomach acid is now neutralising the necrotic solvent at a rate of ninety litres per second. Core temperature: normal. He appears to think that the brass screws are a bit crunchy, but otherwise he finds them acceptable."
"Good boy, Chintu," I said in a mild tone, and gently tapped his huge emerald calf with the rolled-up ledger. "Eat slowly, don't hurry up, for there are still forty-seven bowls on the table."
Chintu gave off a muffled, happy hum and, as he trotted over to the second vat holding the double-headed, lightning-infused canine, his long tail swept across the floor and knocked over three rows of empty dissection tables.
At the same time, Noah had already got to the dissection slab.
The man's face was pale under his dark hood, but his hands were completely steady. He slipped the alchemical scalpel under the brass retractor clamps which were holding the emaciated cultivator down and opened them with exact and minimal force.
The young rogue cultivator groaned as he clutched at his bloody abdomen, his eyes rolling back into his head with delirium. "Not any more... please... don't cut off my manhood."
This man, even in this situation, still puts his manhood before his life; as they say, a man will be a man.
"Noah said this calmly, his voice thick with a strange and dark calm. He pulled a small wooden vial of the regenerative ointment out of his coat, which Roman had made from mountain herbs, and spread it on the torn flesh. The bleeding stopped right away and the visible spiritual root withdrew itself back into the boy's lower abdomen as the tissues started to heal. "The slaughterhouse is closed."
I said to Noah, approaching and looking down at the central brass boiler which anchored the chamber's hydraulic conduits, 'Find the main mana feed for the upper levels. Where is the waste siphon vent?'
Noah used the bloody scalpel to point at a thick, vertical copper pipe which went straight into the ceiling. "That pipe runs directly up into the master bedchamber of the ancestral manor. It's Ruby's private room."
"Splendid," I murmured.
I extended my hand and placed my gloved palm onto the cold metal of the conduit.
I could feel, through the copper, the thin, frantic pulses of Ruby's system as it attempted to contact the lower laboratory. Her interface must have been displaying warning symbols, asking why the biological stability figures for her forty-eight chimeric assets were disappearing from her database at a rate of one every forty-five seconds.
To its system it would appear as a catastrophic software malfunction—an unpredictable and local deletion of data.
I thought to myself, allowing a small and nearly invisible amount of Prana to trickle into the copper wall and moving backward along the signal thread, what would her appraisal skill observe when it tried to scan this conduit from the bedroom above?
The host, I'm pleased to say, has now had the passive feedback loop set up! Although I can't be certain about this since I don't have a link to the main system space, based on my experience I'm sure that her interface will display: 'CRITICAL PLUMBING MALFUNCTION: UNREGISTERED GASTROINTESTINAL ANOMALY OCCUPYING SUB-LEVEL FOUR'.
I smiled and then pulled my hand away. "That's clear and concise, just as you should in a proper bureaucratic error report."
A further huge CRUNCH was heard behind us, after which came the soaking, squelching noise of a glass vat being poured down a prehistoric gullet. Chintu murmured in satisfaction, his emerald scales shining beneath the green rune-lights as he proceeded to vat number twelve.
I told Roman, without turning around, to bind the surviving technicians with spirit-suppression cord and leave them in the drainage trench; Xiaoran was to carry the wounded cultivator out through the aqueduct tether while Lina got the medical bay on the Great White to prepare a recuperation cot.
"And you, Master?" Noah asked, his eyes crimson locking onto the copper conduit leading into the ceiling above.
"Me?" I adjusted my spectacles, smoothing the lapels of my scholar coat as Pushpa gave my ear a gentle, demanding nip. "I am going to inspect the ventilation shafts. When a tenant treats a historic property with this much disrespect, a proper landlord must prepare a formal notice of eviction."