Aetherios System: Whirlwind

Chapter 73: Ex Machina

Alex approached the pedestal in the center of the middle-tunnel room once again. The circular door still shone at the far end. The glyphs shone faintly but Alex read them easily enough as “Boss Behind Here”.

Setting his hand on the port and activating it was just as easier as all the others. By now, Alex could read a bit of the complex holograms, and he didn’t need Obby to parse the basic information it showed.

Yep, end of the second floor here. It’ll seal the door behind me. The room is… the Crucible? Huh. Alex shrugged at this. It didn’t really matter what the facility named the room, it wouldn’t change that fact it would try to kill him.

“We ready?”

“I’m ready. I don’t know about you though. Fix that squishy flesh problem maybe?”

“ Love you too, Obby.”

He activated the door. The glyph flashed and spun, the whole thing moved like a bank vault until Alex heard a loud click . It swing open, revealing a dark passage beyond. He didn’t waste anymore time and started towards the opening.

The moment he stepped into the Crucible chamber, the vibes changed. A tension settled into his shoulders, thick and oppressive. Like stepping into the lungs of a dying beast still clinging to life, a step between death and life.

The door slammed shut behind him with a final clang that echoed through the vaulted stone chamber. Ahead, the room opened wide into a circular basin, cracked with age but pulsing faintly with power. At its heart loomed a ruined glyph ring, its lines were scorched, broken, and humming with unstable aether. Alex stepped across the threshold, boots thudding against black stone. A massive construct waiting at the center dominated the space in his vision, a fractured colossus of crystal, copper conduits, metal plates and rusty rings, among other things. Thin filaments of failed glyphs flickered faintly off it’s surface, like the last breaths of a dying star.

All around the perimeter, tiles etched with glyphs shifted in slow patterns, glowing faintly. Each one seemed dormant... for now.

A projection flickered into view above the shattered ring. It was a glowing schematic of what the glyph below was supposed to be. It hung in the air above his head, lines and sigils burning brightly in his vision, and then vanished. Alex blinked, trying to hold the image in his mind. But the glyph had been a complex sequence, with rings surrounding rings. There was no way he could remember it all.