67

Zeniyon

Rian landed in calm, shallow waters at the bottom of a gorge.

Despite the serenity of the place, he was out of breath. All the close calls in 3-3 had gotten him worked up, and the monolith’s pressure wave had been so strong that it had even drained his stamina.

He took the moment to take in the sight of the area: it looked like he was standing in a cylindrical hole in the ground half a mile wide, half a mile deep. The walls were rocky, with huge patches of moss and cascading waterfalls. Above was a circle of unimpeded blue sky. Instead of a moon and stars, the sun was shining.

This had to be the end of the Caverns of Silence. He’d finally made it.

Like with the end of World 1, Rian noted, there was no EXP reward for the final stage. It wouldn’t happen until after the boss fight.

When he looked around, there was only one other person here, and it wasn’t Corvis.

A cloaked man stood in the shallows with his hood down. With the way the cloak fell across him, he had one arm and one leg exposed. He was buff, evident of an exceptional Strength stat. His hair was cut short, his jaw square and stubbly—a man of picturesque ruggedness.

He watched calmly as Rian stepped toward him through the shallows.

“Have you come here to meditate, young traveler?” the man said, his voice deep but rather friendly.

Carefully watching, Rian shook his head.

“A shame,” the man said. “This is a favorite spot of mine to think and reflect. It feels as if something important is meant to happen here.”

Rian let the silence drag on. It was probably the last moment he’d be on this man’s good side. “Zeniyon, I’m presuming.”

The man seemed taken aback, but his surprise lasted only an instant. “They sent you after me, did they?” He gradually turned his head as if to view Rian from another angle. “You’re not from this time, are you? But you don’t look like one of them, either.”

“An Onsolian? No. But you’re right about the first part. And I’m…supposed to kill you.” Rian scratched the back of his head. There really wasn’t a good way of informing someone they had to die.

Zeniyon said nothing for a breath. “Do you know what will happen here if you try to?”

Rian crossed his arms. He’d been thinking about this for a while on his way here through World 3. With all that he’d seen throughout the Rifts, the answer was clear.

“If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d be completing a temporal loop. It would set off the chain of events that leads to you creating a kingdom of androids to go to war with Onsolia, which would lead to the Undoing, which would cause the events that lead to me coming here. There’s no beginning or end. Just a loop.”

Zeniyon rested his hand on his hip and smiled. “You get it. Whether you try to stop me or not, it won’t work. I’ve seen glimpses of it, myself.” He glanced up at the waterfalls surrounding them in the distance. “In the future, a rift opens, and through those cracks spill countless time travelers who will attempt to end my life at this very moment. But in every outcome, I escape. Not without injury, in most cases. But it’s those injuries that force me to…rebuild myself. A bit further.”

He threw off his cloak. Save for his face, his body was half machine. He wore no shirt—only pants, and his right arm and leg were metallic. Blue rivulets of light surged up and down the material.

“I’ve found this to be a dangerous world,” he said. “To survive, one must shed their old selves. Do you find that’s still true, in your time?”

“Uh. In a roundabout way. Sure.”

“Even so, I’m sure you must agree: the rewards outweigh the risk. And what plentiful bounties await us.”

Zeniyon reached out aside with his mechanical arm as if to grasp something invisible. Like a broken mirror, the space around his arm cracked, showing hundreds of reflections. They shifted, falling away—all but one. And through it, an altered replica of a mechanical arm with an enormous piston fell onto the outside of his arm, attaching itself in a hiss of steam and crackling electricity. It was as if he’d doubled the size of his arm.

“Time is more than just a one-way river here,” he said. “It’s an ocean. And in its depths lies a fortune for us all. Why not help me plunder it? You’ll benefit as much as I do.”

Rian hesitated—not at his words, but at what he’d done to his arm. It shouldn’t’ve been possible: it looked like Zeniyon had opened a parallel universe to attach a module to his mecha-arm. Meaning he’d used a tesseract without actually producing one. But tesseracts hadn’t existed before the Undoing. Not unless he was somehow pulling that energy from the future.

“And what exactly would I get out of helping you?” Rian said.

Zeniyon frowned, then shrugged slightly. “You’ll save us all a whole lot of suffering. If we can harness what this world has to offer, then….” He smiled. “Think of the power we’ll hold. The money we’ll make. I’m sure you’ve seen the fruits of my efforts already; you’re from the future.”

“I’m sorry,” Rian said. “But as far as I know, the future can’t be changed, and you don’t accomplish a damn thing other than breaking the world.” He sighed. “I guess I was hoping for something different. Something that would…offer a way out of all this. But it’s not here. Not yet.” Rian straightened up and looked Zeniyon in the eye. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re going to try to kill the Four, in the future. You’re the Godslayer.”

Zeniyon peered back at him, and Rian hesitated. The reaction told him that Zeniyon was confused by what he’d said. Maybe it was because Zeniyon hadn’t seen it in his future yet, the slaying of the Four. Or maybe Rian was wrong. After all, if Zeniyon couldn’t be killed here, then there was no way to fulfill Corvis’s plea to defeat the Godslayer.

“Well, if it’s not actually you,” Rian said, crossing his arms, “I see no reason to fight. Wanna agree to a truce? We can both go our merry ways.”

A black spear came hurtling down from above. Zeniyon nimbly stepped back. The spear lodged itself into the stone floor beneath the shallows, sending up a wave of water.

It wasn’t a spear. It was a black staff with a golden eye floating atop it.

Corvis floated down between Zeniyon and Rian.

“Hello, Colonel Blair,” Corvis said. “Or should I say, Operative Codename Zeniyon of the Canadian Armed Forces.” Pulling his staff from the ground, Corvis landed in the shallows. “How about you tell our friend here the truth?”

***

Zeniyon’s demeanor changed in an instant. He gritted his teeth and swung his oversized arm with astonishing speed. Corvis evaded the piston-assisted punch by a casual inch.

The air around Corvis shimmered as he backed away, and Zeniyon seemed confused. He looked around and swept his arm through the air like he could no longer see Corvis.

As if to channel his newfound rage into something else, Zeniyon charged toward Rian instead. There was no health bar on him, no stat window or music to announce the boss fight—only silence but for the sound of rushing waterfalls in the distance.

Rian put up his fists, then shouted at Corvis, “What the hell did you just do?”

“Sorry, but what happens next won’t work unless you defeat him. And trust me, he deserves it.” Corvis glared at Zeniyon. “While you’re in this timeline, events must correspond as they do in the future, or else World 4 won’t open. Zeniyon must be injured to the point that it takes a specific amount of time to rebuild himself so that the past and future align.”

Rian understood, but he’d been hoping it would be simpler.

Zeniyon sprinted into range, kicking up the water behind himself. Up close, Rian could see the murderous look in his eyes, the wrinkles on his face, the gray streaks in his hair and his stubble. He was older than Rian had thought.

When Zeniyon punched forward, Rian dodged aside, casting Earthen Resonance for the extra speed. His shins tore through the shallows like blades. He could feel the resistance slowing him, but it was still preferable to leaping, which would cause him to lose the speed bonus from his buff.

Zeniyon’s huge mecha-arm missed Rian by a few feet. The wind rippled past him and even across the surface of the water.

Rian ducked in, Dash-canceled, and got two quick hits in to build his Charge Punch meter and proc Spirit Fists before realizing he was in a trap: Zeniyon curled his arm around to cut off Rian’s escape and grab him.

Rian jumped and immediately slowed down upon leaving the ground. But he was still fast enough to evade the grab. Then Zeniyon reversed the motion and backhanded him.

The impact was so strong that it knocked the wind from Rian and sent him flying. The armor bonus of Spirit Fists hadn’t helped much with only two hits. He’d lost a fourth of his health, but it was already replenishing itself through Corvis’s healing with dozens of blue threads appearing across Rian’s body.

He landed in the shallows—on his feet, thankfully, though it took him a moment to reorient and balance himself. But in the time that it had taken to land, Zeniyon had opened another rift.

Out of it dropped another mecha-arm, but this one was smaller and less clunky. It attached to Zeniyon’s other side, folding itself onto his fleshy arm and encasing it with smooth metal. Vents opened and closed along its length.

As Rian was about to sprint toward him to re-engage, Zeniyon drew back his massive arm. Pistons on the outside of it hissed to life, extending backward. He punched forward and all together the pistons released.

The sound was like a bomb going off. The waters at Zeniyon’s feet went spraying, and the shape of the shock wave emerged as it hurtled toward Rian: a tunnel of compressed air so violent that it stripped the ground clean.

The wind pulled at Rian’s uniform as he dashed aside. The displacement of air had even formed a vacuum. The attack had surprised him, but there was plenty of distance between them to dodge in time.

The pistons reset. Zeniyon aimed and fired again, and Rian kept dodging.

When he noticed Corvis was floating up to him, Rian shouted over the air-bursts, “I don’t think he’s interested in talking anymore. What did you mean by having him tell me the truth?”

“Zeniyon was the first off-worlder to come to Miriad,” Corvis said. “A special operative sent by your military to explore.”

“Huh?” That was about the last thing he’d expected to hear. It was enough to give him pause, but fortunately it seemed Zeniyon’s piston arm had overheated. He was venting a bunch of steam out of it and wasn’t doing much else, giving Rian a moment to collect himself.

“There is a rift that bridges Miriad and Earth,” Corvis said, “created by a kingdom of your home world.”

Kingdom? “You mean a corporation?”

It was Reflect Systems, he realized.

“Whatever you may call it,” Corvis said. “They created the bridge through which your souls—or consciousness if you prefer—are deposited into the Vessels born here.”

Was that what Reflect Systems’ quantum computer had truly done: create a bridge to another world? It seemed more and more likely that Miriad wasn’t just a simulated place happening inside a computer. Had they found a bridge to another world, and then tried to cover it up as a VRMMO?

Why in the world would they—

“He’d never tell you any of this, of course,” Corvis said. “But as you can see, he’s rather upset that someone knows.”

“You’re not making this up, right?”

“I can’t lie to you, remember? The truth is going to come out sooner or later.”

“Yeah, but how do you know this? If you’re leaking some kind of military secret—”

Oh god, Rian thought, his heart pounding. Was this all some kind of conspiracy spanning the Canadian Armed Forces, the government, and Reflect Systems? The scope of it all suddenly seemed far too big. “Why aren’t you, like, exploding right now?” he asked Corvis. “Wouldn’t there be some kind of failsafe baked into the System for something like that?”

Rian couldn’t avoid letting Zeniyon hear his side of the conversation. And it was clear that, by the way Zeniyon’s rage intensified with each word spoken, Rian was prying open something he wasn’t meant to.

“You’re right to presume there are consequences,” Corvis said. “But only for certain individuals—those who do not bare the Mark. Even I would be subject to…an unfortunate outcome…if I were not under Yindra’s protection as well. There are limits to that protection, but this isn’t one of them.”

“‘Not one of them?’ What could be worse than a military secret?”

Corvis was silent for a moment, then changed the subject: “Zeniyon is here to begin plundering Miriad of its temporal energy. He can extract it from the future. But there is another reason he’s here. He is performing a reconnaissance mission—for a specific purpose. Testing the waters, if you will.”

“What for?”

Another explosion—Rian reacted on reflex, dashing sideways as the next wind tunnel tore past him.

“An invasion,” Corvis said.

“I see,” Rian said sadly.

“Your home world’s operation in ours, as a whole even to this day, is held together by tenuous strings. Sooner or later they’re going to snap.” Corvis’s expression darkened. “We just need to be ready when it does.”

That was right: even if Rian’s journey was doomed, he’d still pledged to do everything he could for Miriad. Even if fighting Ogrot was a dead-end, there would always be more to do for the sake of this world’s future.

Another rift had opened around Zeniyon. It wasn’t a limb emerging this time, but rather something small, spherical, and steadily orbiting around him. Rian wasn’t sure what it was, but it couldn’t be good.

He swore under his breath. The longer this took, the worse his odds. Kick into top gear, he told himself. Go full tryhard!