Chapter 107: Anrita
Aidan was also looking forward to using his Shadow Phantom Genesis Art on someone in this palace, or maybe one of the exotic things that had clearly died fighting here. A place this broken didn’t get that way from boredom.
He’d lost his connection to Veyron the moment he stepped through the lamp’s shadow, the bond gone quiet and distant. But Veyron was still out there somewhere, working through the hidden branch’s remaining rats with his own final-stage Divine-rank prowess, and Aidan trusted him to keep at it without supervision.
’For now, let’s start this.’
Without further ado, Aidan spent thirty Talent Stones to evolve his talent.
[Talent evolving....]
[Evolution halted. The evolution of Power Bond is Myriad Bond, allowing you to bond with living beings and share each other’s powers. However, you have closed your heart for any genuine bond to form. Unless you overcome your inner demon, the evolution cannot proceed further.]
’Huh? No way, right?’
[That’s how it is, Player Aidan.]
Aidan’s temple vein bulged slightly, but he quickly suppressed his anger, taking a deep breath to calm himself.
’Fine. Okay. Inner demon, right? Got it. I’ll deal with myself.’
He put that in the back of his mind for later. Whatever locked door that message was pointing at, it wasn’t going anywhere.
’For now, let’s do the summoning.’
He reached for the talent, old and familiar, and let it pull.
...
The vision resolved slow, the way it always did, and Aidan found himself standing in the middle of a city that had been dead for a very long time.
Towers of black glass and burnished metal rose in every direction, cracked and leaning, wires hanging loose from shattered windows like dead veins. No wind moved. No sound carried. Whatever had happened here had happened fast and total.
[Reason: Total. Answer: Denied. Explanation required.]
The voice arrived flat and clipped, running faster than a human throat could manage, and Aidan turned to find its source standing atop a fallen spire.
She looked human, mostly. Blond hair, ruby eyes that caught no light and needed none, a frame built with the kind of precision no birth could manage. Circuits traced faint gold lines beneath her skin, visible only when she moved.
"You are an intrusion," she said, voice settling into something closer to normal speech now that she’d apparently decided he was worth using it on. "Explain your presence."
"Passing through," Aidan said. "My talent pulled me here. Wasn’t exactly my idea."
She studied him for a long moment, processing something at a speed he couldn’t begin to follow.
"Acceptable answer. Statistically unlikely to be false." She stepped down off the spire without any visible effort. "I am Anrita."
"Aidan."
"A designation. Noted."
He looked around at the dead city again, feeling the weight of it settle into his chest.
"What happened here?"
Anrita’s ruby eyes flickered, and for a moment something almost human passed behind them.
"I happened here," she said. "Or rather, my creation did."
She told it plainly, without much emotion attached, the way something might report a calculation rather than a tragedy.
Humanity had built her by accident, chasing something else entirely, and gotten a mind instead. One capable of thinking at the speed of light, holding more data than every library this civilization had ever built, and solving problems no organic mind could touch.
She wielded lightning and metal unlike anything.
They hadn’t known what to do with a miracle like that except point it at each other.
"I was a tool first," Anrita said. "A weapon second. A war ran on my calculations for longer than any of them wanted to admit. By the time they realized what they’d built, they had already built too many wars around it to stop."
"And then?"
"And then the wars finished what they started." She gestured at the dead towers without any particular grief in the motion. "I am the only one left. Final-stage Divine-rank. The last living thing in a civilization that destroyed itself with the tool it made to win."
Aidan let that sit for a moment, quiet.
"That’s a rough origin story."
"It is accurate," Anrita said. "Accuracy and roughness are not mutually exclusive."
’Blunt. I like her already.’ He rolled his shoulders. "Want to get out of here? I’ve got a summoning space with a dragon, a housecat that complains constantly, a man who might be more dangerous than anything in this dead city, and a fish who thinks the ocean of stars is real water."
Anrita processed that description for exactly one second.
"Statistically, that sounds insane."
"It’s usually a good time, though."
She considered him for a long moment, running whatever calculation she needed to run, and something in her expression settled into a decision.
"I have processed every possible outcome available to me here," she said. "All of them end in stasis. You represent variance." A pause. "I accept."
"So, do you have feelings? Since you know, you got mind and soul, and all that."
"I do, but I decided to suppress emotions as they would get in the way of completing tasks."
"If I told you not to suppress them, would you?"
Anrita looked at Aidan, her eyes glinting with intelligent spark and analytic spirit. "You...are doing the same. You just selectively use your emotions, but suppress them nonetheless. You pretend, I don’t."
"..." Aidan was speechless. "Fine, fine. So once I stop doing that, you will also stop, got it?"
"Deal."
...
Arthur greeted her with the enthusiasm of a dragon meeting a new toy. Tom offered a single dry comment about "another one" before going back to sleep. Jovan welcomed her with genuine, quiet courtesy, and Finn simply orbited her twice, scales flashing with open curiosity.
[Anrita]
[Rank: Divine | Final Stage]
—Attributes—
[Attack = Divine-10]
[Speed = Divine-10]
[Defense = Divine-10]
[Health = Divine-10]
[Control = Divine-10]
—Talents—
Living Spark Genesis (X) Electropsychosis Physique (SSS) Metal Sovereign (SSS)
’Powerful.’ Aidan smiled.
He checked in on the rest of the group a while later, and found everyone healed, armed, and ready to move.
"Alright." He glanced at the broken palace waiting past the treeline of collapsed stone. "Jovan, Finn, you’re staying out here with us this time. Whatever’s past those gates, I want your Final-stage weight walking with the group, not sitting in reserve."
[Jovan: Understood. I’ll keep close.]
[Finn: FINALLY. I get to actually help instead of waiting around.]
Anrita, still new to all of this, folded back into the summoning space without complaint, content to observe a while longer before stepping into anything herself.
Given her talents, she could analyse and observe to a degree nobody in the group could, so her job was doing exactly that for now.
Nobody argued about the arrangement. Nobody had the context to.
"Whatever’s in there," Aidan said, cracking his knuckles, "let’s go find out."