Episode-997
Chapter : 1993
He shivered. The rain was warm, but his body was cold from the shock. He hugged himself, looking at the wreckage of his masterpiece. The Aegis Mark I, the weapon built to kill gods, looked pathetic here. It was covered in mud and vines, a dark scar in the vibrant green of the jungle.
"Ken?" Lloyd called out. His voice was swallowed instantly by the roar of the rain. "Jasmin? Iffrit?"
No answer.
He closed his eyes and tried to sense his spirits. He reached out for the bond with Fang Fairy, the connection with Atlas.
It was like reaching for a phantom limb. He knew the connection should be there, but he couldn't feel it. It was faint, distant, like a radio signal that was almost pure static. They were there, somewhere deep inside his soul, but they were dormant. Sleeping.
"Mana density is too low," Lloyd realized, speaking aloud to keep himself calm. "They can't manifest. There’s no fuel here."
He was alone. Truly alone.
He looked at his hands. They were shaking. For the first time in a long time, Lloyd Ferrum—the man who had stared down Demon Kings and corporate hit squads—felt a flicker of genuine fear. Not the tactical fear of a battle, but the primal fear of a castaway.
He patted his pockets. He had his belt knife. He had his clothes. And he had the ruined suit behind him. That was it.
"Okay," Lloyd said. "Assess. Survive. Adapt. Major General protocol."
He wiped the rain from his face and looked at the environment again. He needed to know where he was. The trees looked familiar, but not from Riverio. They looked like Teak. He saw a cluster of bamboo swaying in the wind nearby.
"Bamboo," Lloyd muttered. "Teak. Heavy monsoon rain."
He looked at the ground. The mud was red-brown, clay-like.
His mind, which held the knowledge of an eighty-year-old Earth genius, started to connect the dots. This biome wasn't alien. It was tropical. It was Earth-like.
He turned back to the Aegis suit. He needed data. The main computer was dead, but there was always a backup. The suit had a "Black Box"—a hardened recorder for emergency diagnostics. It had its own tiny power cell, designed to last for a few minutes after a catastrophic failure.
Lloyd climbed back up the slippery leg of the mech. He jammed his upper body back into the cockpit. It was dark, and water was pooling in the seat. He reached under the dashboard, his fingers searching for a small panel.
He found it. He ripped the panel cover off.
There was a small, dusty screen, no bigger than a playing card. Next to it was a red button.
"Please," Lloyd whispered. "Just give me something. Give me a map. Give me a star chart."
He pressed the button.
The screen flickered. It was dim, barely visible in the gloom of the storm. Static danced across the glass. Then, green text began to scroll.
SYSTEM REBOOT... FAILED.
MAIN POWER... OFFLINE.
MANA CORE... DISCONNECTED.
EMERGENCY SENSORS... ACTIVE.
Lloyd held his breath. The emergency sensors didn't use magic. They used passive reception. They looked at the stars, the magnetic field, and the atmospheric composition.
ANALYZING ENVIRONMENT...
ATMOSPHERE: NITROGEN 78%, OXYGEN 21%.
GRAVITY: 1.0 G.
Lloyd stared at the numbers. It was Earth standard. Exactly Earth standard.
MATCHING STELLAR PATTERNS...
WARNING: CLOUD COVER OBSTRUCTING VISUALS.
SWITCHING TO MAGNETIC GEOLOCATION.
The screen blinked. It was thinking. Lloyd waited, the sound of the rain drumming on the hull above him.
CALCULATION COMPLETE.
LOCATION IDENTIFIED.
A map appeared on the tiny screen. It wasn't the map of the Northern Territories. It wasn't the map of the Devil Region. It was a jagged, triangular piece of land surrounded by water on two sides.
Lloyd recognized the shape instantly. He had studied it in geography class a lifetime ago.
It was the Indian Subcontinent.
The blinking green dot was on the western edge, in a mountain range that ran parallel to the coast.
"India," Lloyd breathed. "I'm in India."
But that didn't make sense. He had fallen through a dimensional rift. Had he been sent back to his original world? Was this the future? The past?
He looked at the bottom of the screen. The date.
The sensor was trying to calculate the date based on the position of the magnetic poles and the slight drift of the continents. It was imprecise, but it was usually close.
ESTIMATED DATE:
The numbers rolled like a slot machine.
1... 4... 7... 3...
YEAR: 1473 AD.
Chapter : 1994
Lloyd froze. The rain seemed to stop. The noise of the jungle faded away. All he could hear was the blood rushing in his ears.
1473 AD.
He wasn't in the 21st century. He wasn't in the future. He was in the past. The 15th Century.
The Middle Ages.
The screen flickered again. The battery was dying. The green light started to fade.
BATTERY CRITICAL.
SHUTTING DOWN.
"Wait!" Lloyd shouted at the screen. "No! Don't turn off!"
But the machine didn't care. The light shrank to a single dot, and then vanished. The cockpit was dark again.
Lloyd slowly pulled himself out of the machine. He sat on the edge of the open hatch, his legs dangling in the rain.
He was in India. In the year 1473.
This was before the industrial revolution. Before electricity. Before the British Empire. This was the time of sultans and rajas, of swords and elephants.
And he was here, a man who knew how to build robots and railguns, trapped in a time where gunpowder was barely a rumor.
Lloyd looked out at the jungle. Through the grey curtain of rain, he saw something he hadn't noticed before.
On a distant hill, poking out above the treeline, was a stone structure. It was a tower, intricately carved, dark and wet with rain. It had a curved top, distinct and unmistakable. A temple. It stood silent and ancient, watching him.
It was real. The architecture confirmed what the computer had said.
A wave of dizziness hit him. He wasn't the Lord of Ferrum here. He wasn't a General. He wasn't a husband to three queens.
He was a ghost from the future.
The realization hit him harder than Anthony’s punches. He was completely, utterly off the map. His money was useless. His titles were meaningless. His magic was gone.
Lloyd Ferrum sat in the pouring rain, on top of a dead robot from another world, and for the first time in two lifetimes, he had absolutely no idea what to do next.
________________________________________
The rain didn't stop. If anything, it got heavier. It felt personal, like the sky was trying to wash Lloyd off the face of the earth.
Lloyd slid down from the Aegis suit again, his boots splashing into the mud. He needed to get away from the crash site. The giant black robot was a beacon. Even in 1473, a twelve-foot metal giant falling from the sky would attract attention. And attention was the last thing he needed right now. He was unarmed, exhausted, and magically bankrupt.
He looked at the Aegis one last time. It was a heartbreaking sight. The matte-black armor, forged from Star-Frost Ore, was dull and lifeless. The railgun on its back was bent. The cockpit was open to the rain, flooding the delicate controls. His masterpiece, the weapon he had built to save his world, was now just a very expensive piece of lawn art in a jungle halfway across the universe.
"Stay here," Lloyd whispered to the machine, feeling foolish. "Don't go anywhere."
He turned and started walking.
Moving through the jungle was a nightmare. The ground wasn't solid; it was a soup of mud and rotting vegetation. Every step was a battle. Vines snagged his clothes. Thorns tore at his sleeves. The air was so humid it felt like he was drinking it rather than breathing it.
He headed toward higher ground, toward the stone temple he had seen in the distance. High ground meant safety. It meant a vantage point.
As he walked, his mind—the mind of KM Evan—started to reboot. The shock was fading, replaced by the cold, hard operating system of a soldier.
Situation Analysis, he thought.
Location: Western Ghats, India.
Time: 1473 AD.
Status: Separated from unit. No communications. No supply drops.
Objective: Survival.
He knew a little about this time period from his history books on Earth. The 15th century in India was a chaotic time. The north was dominated by the Delhi Sultanate. The south was ruled by the Vijayanagara Empire—the "City of Victory." The Bahmani Sultanate was somewhere in the middle. It was a time of constant war, shifting borders, and immense wealth.
But Lloyd wasn't near a city. He was in the wild. And the wild in 1473 India was a dangerous place. There were tigers here. Leopards. Elephants. Cobras. And he didn't have his Spirit Force to protect him.
He reached for a tree branch to steady himself and stopped. He looked at his hand.