Chapter 38 Thirty Eight
Chapter 38 Thirty Eight
The giant layout of machines stretched out below them for what looked like miles.
Every single dormant Vex was placed with a ridiculous amount of precision that just couldn't be a random accident.
Their heavy metal legs were already sinking deep into the wet, softened earth.
It looked like they had been standing out here in the rain long enough for the mud to start swallowing them whole.
"I am going down there," Himari said, wiping the cold rainwater from her eyelashes.
Shinnosuke didn't follow her right away; he just stood frozen at the very edge of the rocky ridge.
His left hand automatically moved up to rest on his dead forearm where his wire used to live.
His face was completely unreadable, but it wasn't that creepy, empty look he had back at the colony.
It looked more like a guy who was slowly remembering how it felt to be totally confused instead of just emotionally dead.
"The grid readings down there are completely off the charts," Shinnosuke said, his voice dropping an octave.
Himari glanced back at him over her shoulder. "Are you scared?"
"I do not think fear is the correct term for what is happening in my head right now," he replied.
He looked down at his twitching fingers, then back at the massive valley of silent machines.
"I just do not know what we are supposed to do if they all wake up at once," he admitted.
Himari gave him a small, sad smile. "We walk anyway."
She started hiking down the slippery slope, her boots kicking up loose shale as she neared the bottom.
She didn't feel a single shred of fear as she stepped right into the front line of the dormant monsters.
The first Vex she passed was a massive brute unit, its chassis covered in rust and dried red spore dust.
Its main sensor lens was dark and empty, staring blankly at the far hills.
As Himari walked deeper into the maze of metal, the strange frequency in her chest started to pick up speed.
It wasn't a painful feeling at all, but it was incredibly strong, vibrating right behind her ribs.
"Can you hear me out here, Kaito?" she whispered, her voice getting swallowed by the open plain.
She kept moving through the narrow spaces between the frozen machines, her jacket brushing against their cold armor.
The internal hum in her body grew louder and heavier with every single step she took toward the center.
She could tell the whole arrangement was shifting, the rows of Vex curving inward like a giant whirlpool.
Everything in the entire valley seemed to be pointing toward one exact spot in the middle of the mud.
When she finally broke through the inner circle of machines, she found a completely vacant space.
It was just a small patch of untouched ground surrounded by a wall of silent metal giants.
Right in the middle of the dirt, there was a faint, geometric outline embedded deeply into the soil.
It looked exactly like a physical impression left behind by someone who had been kneeling there for a long time.
It looked like they had stayed in that exact position before suddenly rising and moving further down the valley.
"He was right here," Himari muttered, her knees shaking as she walked toward the outline.
She dropped her heavy pack into the mud and fell to her knees right at the edge of the impression.
She extended her hand, her fingers trembling as she pressed her bare palm flat against the cold, wet earth.
The moment her skin touched the dirt, the internal frequency exploded with a massive wave of energy.
It didn't hurt her, but the sheer power of the signal made her gasp for air.
It felt exactly like a long-distance radio call that had been searching for a signal for years finally hitting a nearby receiver.
"Shinnosuke!" she screamed back toward the ridge, her voice full of panic and excitement. "Get down here right now!"
She reached over and snatched the portable frequency recorder out of her side pocket.
The screen wasn't showing a dead flat line anymore; it was completely glitching out with wild green data.
The device started capturing layers of strange acoustic data that began to echo through the small speaker.
It was a deep, cyclical sound that hummed through the valley like a massive sub-woofer buried in the rock.
Each dormant Vex in the circle was producing a tiny, low resonance that you could barely hear with a human ear.
But when you put all thousands of them together, the collective noise reconstructed a fragmented pattern over and over.
"What is that noise?" Shinnosuke asked, finally jogging into the clearing, his breath coming in short gasps.
Himari held the recorder up so he could see the looping wavelengths on the tiny monitor.
"It's a loop," she said, her eyes wide as she listened to the rhythmic static. "They're replaying something."
The entire formation wasn't just a random gathering of junked machines; it was a colossal memory-storage system.
The Vex were keeping a broken piece of a signal alive, looping it through their wires while they waited in the rain.
"They are waiting for the missing piece," Shinnosuke said, his voice losing some of its robotic flatness.
Himari looked back down at the center of the kneeling print in the dirt. "They're waiting for him to finish the sentence."
She could feel the resonance vibrating through the soles of her boots, making her teeth click together.
It felt like Kaito was trying to shout a message from the other side of a thick brick wall.
The machines were just the speakers he was using to amplify the sound so she could find him.
"We need to find out where the next line goes," Himari said, wiping rainwater from the recorder's screen.
Shinnosuke walked around the perimeter of the empty space, his eyes scanning the frozen rows of armor.
"The loop is unstable," he noted. "If the frequency keeps cycling like this without a connection, the system will fry."
"He won't let it fry," she said. "He's too stubborn for that."
She looked back at the hand print in the mud, her mind racing with a million different thoughts.
She remembered how Kaito used to fix their broken stove back in Sector 4 with nothing but a rusty screwdriver and a lot of cursing.
He never gave up on a machine once he started messing with its innards.
He was doing the exact same thing now, except the machine was the entire world outside the city.
"We have to find the anchor," Himari told herself, her fingers digging deeper into the softened earth.
She started pushing the wet mud aside, ignoring the sharp rocks that cut into her cuticles.
The frequency recorder in her lap let out a sharp beep, the green lines spikes getting higher and higher.
"Himari, step back from the center," Shinnosuke warned, taking a step toward her with his hand outstretched.
"No, there's something else down here," she insisted, her hand hitting something hard and smooth beneath the dirt.
She pulled her hand back, scraping away the last layer of wet soil from the center of the impression.
Lying right there in the middle of the mud was a second crystallized fragment.
It was partially buried in the earth, its surface glowing with the exact same soft blue geometry as the Palace Wire.
But this piece was completely different from the ancient stone they had left behind in the palace foundations.
This one was much smaller, looking like a fresh splinter broken off a larger block.
It looked completely brand new, the blue lines shifting and racing across the surface like liquid light.
Himari didn't even hesitate for a single fraction of a second.
She reached down into the mud and gripped the small crystal tightly in her bare hand.
The rock was incredibly warm against her freezing fingers, almost like a living body radiating heat in the winter.
The second her fingers locked around the crystal, the deep humming sound in the valley stopped completely.
The silence came back for a split second, heavy and terrifyingly absolute.
Then, a loud, synchronized metallic click echoed across the entire plain.
Himari froze, her heart stopping in her chest as she slowly looked up from the dirt.
Every single one of the thousands of dormant Vex in the formation had just turned their heads simultaneously.
Their dark, empty lenses were all pointed directly at her.