The Last Mortal

CHAPTER 6: THE ARCHIVE BREACH

 

The air inside the subterranean archives was completely frozen, preserved by thick plates of blue frost-stone built into the stone walls to keep the massive server units from overheating.

Millions of digital scrolls and ancestral memory drives floated inside glass cylinders filled with clear oil, glowing with a faint silver light that cast long, distorted shadows across the floor. This was the central nervous system of the Upper Ring, a sanctuary of stolen knowledge where the history and genetic blueprints of every bloodline on earth were categorized, audited, and stored away like corporate assets.

"The main database frame is at the very end of the central aisle," Mira’s voice crackled through my earpiece, her breathing fast, shallow, and heavy with static.

She was monitoring the palace's external security grids from a temporary tap in a hidden maintenance shaft nearby. "Ren, you have to hurry. The courtyard shutdown didn't just delay the standard guards; it tripped a hard-line emergency alert directly to the High Inquisitor's private terminal. They know exactly which sector has been compromised."

"I am already at the console," I said, stepping up to a massive black stone terminal that jutted out from the floor like a monolith.

I pulled the high-tier master token I had taken from Master Lin and jammed it into the reader slot. The interface immediately woke up, a wide sheet of blue light projecting into the air in front of my ballistic visor. Rows of system files, lineage family trees, and tax records scrolled past at high speed, their directories locked behind complex biometric firewalls that would take an ordinary slicer weeks to decrypt.

I didn't try to crack the encryption codes manually. I placed my bare palm flat against the cold stone console, letting a thread of my stolen water-weaver energy leak directly into the circuitry. The fluid-based essence acted as an organic conductor, flowing through the copper channels and forcing the digital gates open by completely overriding their electrical resistance.

The data stream on my visor's HUD began to clear, replaced by a deep system search directory that sliced through the palace architecture.

[Master Access Authorized.]

[Searching Core Registry: Project Ascension.]

[Target Identified: Lira Ashveil.]

I stared at the medical logs that filled the screen, my eyes narrowing behind the black visor. My fingers tightened against the edge of the stone console, the stone-shaper energy in my palms causing the polished black material to splinter and crack under my grip.

The logs weren't a record of elite training or ancestral awakening as our family elders had promised when they sold her away. They were a series of extraction logs, detailing exactly how much raw silver essence had been forcefully pulled from her marrow every week to stabilize the decaying cellular structure of the Veyn bloodline. They were using her as a biological battery.

"Ren," Mira's voice cut through the com-link, her tone turning into a sharp panic that overrode the internal filters. "The localized temperature in your sector just dropped twenty degrees. The external security feed went entirely black. He's there."

A heavy, suffocating weight dropped onto my shoulders from above, the sudden atmospheric pressure cracking the stone tiles beneath my boots. The blue frost-stone along the walls groaned as a deep, purple aura flooded the corridor, warping the air until the floating glass server cylinders began to tilt on their axes. The gravity in the room shifted instantly, pulling the loose dust motes toward the far end of the aisle.

"A common baseline mortal standing in the high archive," a smooth, cultured voice echoed from the shadows behind the terminal. "The mainframe anomalies are getting bolder by the year."

A tall man stepped out from the darkness. He wore the heavy, fur-lined robes of a High Inquisitor, a massive silver pendulum swinging slowly from his right hand. His eyes were wide, completely devoid of pupils, glowing with a deep, gravitational purple light that caused the stone floor around his boots to hover an inch off the ground.

"You must be the glitch that broke my gate," the Inquisitor said, his voice entirely calm as he raised his left hand. "I am Inquisitor Dominic. Your journey ends in the directory, anomaly."

He flicked his wrist. The gravity inside the aisle reversed instantly, lifting me off my feet and slamming my back into the reinforced ceiling with enough force to dent the metal plating. The air was squeezed from my lungs as the purple aura tightened around my throat like an invisible executioner's noose. My limbs felt heavy, pinned against the metal overhead structure by an artificial gravitational force that multiplied my physical weight by ten.

"A body with no signature," Dominic mused, walking slowly down the aisle beneath me, his boots clicking rhythmically against the stone tiles. He looked up, his pupilless purple eyes reflecting off the polished surface of my ballistic visor. "You have no ancestral thread, yet you possess the audacity to touch the scripts of your betters. You formatted my guards, didn't you? You dragged their essence out of their cores. An interesting virus, but a virus is still just a collection of bad code that needs to be scrubbed."

He tightened his fist, and the gravitational pressure increased. The metal ceiling beneath me began to buckle, warping around my body as the sheer weight threatened to snap my spine. My visor's HUD flashed a series of critical alerts, the internal systems struggling to calculate the immense structural stress.

[Warning: Structural Integrity at 42%.]

[External Pressure: 15G.]

[Biological Status: Critical Failure Imminent.]

"Ren, drop the loop!" Mira screamed through the static of the radio, her voice fading as the gravitational field began to distort the wireless frequencies between our units. "He's a Gold-rank Gravity-Weaver! You can't match his density with iron or bronze!"

I couldn't breathe to answer her. My lungs were compressed flat against my chest cavity, my vision tunneling into dark, pixelated spots behind the screen. But Dominic made one fatal mistake. He thought my lack of an aura was a weakness, a missing component that made me fragile. He didn't realize that my emptiness was an active state.

I stopped fighting the gravity field. Instead of trying to push against the downward force, I opened the internal directory inside my mind and deactivated the fake Iron-rank pulse entirely. I returned to absolute zero.

The moment my signature hit a true null value, the gravitational script holding me against the ceiling lost its anchor point. Dominic’s purple aura didn't just fail to hold me; the gravity field slipped, its parameters unable to calculate a target with zero mass density. I fell from the ceiling, dropping straight through the purple light and landing lightly on my boots in front of his console.

Dominic’s eyes widened, the silver pendulum in his hand freezing mid-swing as his internal tracking metrics returned a total runtime exception. "What... how did you delete the vector?"

"I told your master of ceremonies," I said, my voice cutting through the silent archive like a blade. "Your scripts are outdated."

I lunged forward, using the residual momentum of the falling gravity field to close the distance before he could reset his coordinates. My hand shot out, my fingers targeting his throat.