BP-6 Anathema of Ægir

Ugh, what a stench.

All these years and they still won't make better camouflage cream—it wouldn't do any harm for us to at least smell different from the Seaborn, you know.

Don't move so much, Shark. It'll only make the smell stronger.

When you smell this much like a Seaborn, I might hack at you on instinct.

The whole plateau is trembling... Those giant wormlike Seaborn are tunneling through the rock beneath us.

Stay concealed.

(Vacuole lightly trembles)

(Core shudders fiercely)

Look at those numbers. Honestly, between the currents and the Seaborn, who's carrying who?

They're flooding towards the frontline. I can't imagine...

Can't imagine what the soldiers there are fighting through.

Snap out of it, Skadi. You'll crush your hilt doing that.

We mourn those on the front best by completing our mission.

Thanks to the Legions' fleets containing the Seaborn swarm, we were able to slip in and plant this beacon deep in the nest.

Even a single plant could alert the Seaborn to us, if it happens to be assimilated. There is no room for negligence on our path forward.

The great bleached coral will cover us as we dive for the depths of the rift.

Yes, Captain.

Jordi, right? Fast learner.

A lot of students come here on work experience. With all the operation protocol, it never takes more than a day for them to slip up. You, though, picked it up just by watching for a little while.

You done this before?

Just a bit. I've done some work in an Iberian lighthouse. The beacons share a few principles with it, here and there.

I see, so you're into engineering. Explains a lot.

I've worked longest as a caregiver, though.

'Caregiver'? What kind of job's that?

Huh?

Ah, er, watching over the sick and elderly, taking care of their daily needs... Sorting out all the little things for them.

Gotcha. So it's like slapping Little Handy modules 153 and 274 in at the same time.

Um, but the Little Handy is impersonal... right?

That's correct.

You look taut as a wire, Jordi. This isn't an exam on Ægir general knowledge.

I just want to ask... if the Little Handy has no personality, how is it supposed to meet the emotional needs of its patients?

To care for people is to meet them in their weakest, most vulnerable moments, after all.

I'd say physical frailty doesn't particularly inspire emotional needs in us. And if we're headed for the grave, even with illness, we don't feel especially vulnerable, either.

We do let the old and sick request some final company before their euthanasia, though. Usually a leading philosopher will come in. Scholars from whatever field in general, really.

I-I know nothing about philosophy...

I just talk to them about the most banal things. Food, flowers, sunshine, and so on. But for some reason, they're always so happy to listen.

You're a great guy, Jordi.

That shows how keen you are at grasping people's moods. No promises, but something tells me you'd shine in the Institute of Development Planning or Institute of Incubation too.

C-Could I?

...Regardless, thank you so much! I've finished resetting the storage facilities here!

Wonderful work. Now, about—

Wait. Did you just see something zip past the hologram?

Wha—

INTRUDER—

......

You?

Young man, you saw none of this. You have no reason to complicate things.

Wait!

Shark's saw will be too loud. Skadi, you open the way.

Cut through this cluster, as quietly as you can.

Alright.

(Soft membrane stirs)

(Creased skin shudders)

They just keep on leaving the nest. Rushing... for the frontline.

Wait, don't you think something's off? How did that one turn into a whole bunch out of nowhere?

What is it doing? Multiplying? Splitting?

I've had this gnawing feeling ever since we bailed out the fleet. Swordfish, have these assholes evolved even more?

The Seaborn are forever evolving.

Skadi, can you remember the first Seaborn you ever killed?

Not really. Just that it had a lot of gross tentacles.

That's what I mean. Tentacles, stingers, chitinous shells... We could still discern the organs, identify their functions at a glance.

Prior to this, the Seaborn's only skill was to hijack whatever evolutionary progress other species had accrued over the epochs.

But now we've got these things...

I can't begin to tell what their organs are. If I didn't know better, I might not even think to connect them to the fodder we were slaughtering just three months ago.

...The Seaborn's needs have outgrown the evolutionary advancements. They've begun seeking their own answers.

Which means their evolutionary course now transcends our knowledge.

If we are unable to gloss their physical composition, unable to discern their organs' unique functions, unable to predict the direction they will evolve...

We won't know how to kill them.

We could fetch a specimen for Advisor Blandus, while we evacuate.

Still, the mission takes priority for now.

Skadi, you and I will find where the wall hasn't yet been branded, embed the beacon there, and activate it.

Laurentina, spot our surroundings. We withdraw as soon as it's planted, without delay.

Greetings, Doctor of Rhodes Island, and well met in Milliarium. At long last, our first official conversation.

Save your modesty. Dr. Kal'tsit's awe-inspiring knowledge transcends the boundaries of space and time.

So for her to be keeping you up her sleeve, the depths you hide must be deeper still.

Whether you come to me in doubt, or with conclusions of your own to share, I am prepared to listen.

Much like Dr. Kal'tsit, you have misgivings about this decision.

Yet I had no choice but to order them to meet death in the eye once more; my hand was forced. Only they can break our present impasse.

The Legions are deployed to capacity. The Abyssal Hunters must assume combat duties, even having recently returned to Ægir. You suspect this situation was deliberately engineered.

I gather you return from the city with findings of your own.

Little Handy, priority order. Contact the supervisors for the beacon and Class IV weapons R&D.

And notify all Legion commanders: leave enough of your fleets at the front to curb the Seaborn and assist the Hunters. The rest should withdraw in order and return to the city. The Sea Patrol will seize the beacon tower right away.

You have our gratitude for informing us, Doctor.

I know I owe the two of you an explanation for how I have deployed the Abyssal Hunters.

We don't hold you accountable on a tactical level. You know their prowess against the Seaborn better than us.

I can only say this. Your powers of observation would not have missed the scales on Gladiia's neck.

We can assume the Hunters will have no trouble seeing this assignment through, but what was your guarantee they would be spared from mutating while in the nest?

The word of Advisor Blandus, and nothing more?

Advisor Blandus's statement at the tribunal served to strengthen Milliarium's confidence in the Abyssal Hunters.

I confess, though, it failed to even ease my mind.

I take it the Hunters still weigh heavily on your thoughts.

...Ægir never truly wound down the Abyssal Hunter project, following the strike on the Firstborn.

I've not been involved, but my countrymen have every right to interrogate me for my awareness of it alone.

For a short time after the Firstborn died, the project went through major upheavals. Anomalies plagued the experiments, and the Church grew only more fixated on the Hunters.

This suggests there are urgent, hidden truths about the Hunters yet to be found. Yet it also proves that the project can no longer run publicly.

To this day, it still operates in secret. But even now, Ægir has only three Hunters including Gladiia... No, four.

For how constantly we iterate on our technology, we have never succeeded in making another Abyssal Hunter.

No matter how stable the subjects' signs and psychological indicators are, they lose their reason the moment they awaken, immediately corrupting into Seaborn.

They don't even make it out of the chamber, let alone to the ocean proper.

We don't know.

We still don't know why Gladiia's group have kept their reason intact.

...Indeed. For Gladiia, Laurentina, Skadi, and all the participants, it was an irresponsible act.

But the front lies at Milliarium now.

We made it in time to cut off the Seaborn tide as it laps at dry land, but Milliarium is far from impregnable. If we fail to open the Waterway now, it is only a matter of time before the city is lost.

The Seaborn have organized to seize that Waterway by the throat. Storming them head-on will invite a large-scale counterattack.

At which point, I fear none will survive.

The Hunters may well give their lives. They may well transform. But right now, they are our greatest hope.

Gladiia has always been skeptical of the Waterway Program's feasibility. It was for that exact reason that she did not hesitate to serve as a link in its chain.

Your doubts and struggles may differ, but all roads lead to the same place in the end. That seems to be an unspoken yet shared understanding among the Ægir.

...One not without its sorrows.

Upon the bricks of the Sophontheatrum entrance, the architect Mártus left this maxim: 'There is no justice here, only the path ahead.'

In later generations, some criticized Mártus as being overly fixated on material value, squandering his energy on comparing worth against worth.

But ultimately, all that mattered to him was Ægir's path forward. Justice was merely a value cherished by the masses; and he preferred to apply his thought elsewhere.

Perhaps Gladiia and I have been acting on his philosophy without realizing it.

Dr. Kal'tsit, everything you have said rings all too true. I am bound in the end to carry 'Ægir's arrogance' with me, and nothing will change that.

I would like to amend that wording. 'Arrogance' as a word seems insufficient to describe Ægir.

You respect equally the humanity of your every citizen. To realize each individual's worth is the guiding star for your entire society's development.

Yet at the same time, you are capable of making the cruelest judgments, and calmly accepting them, for the sake of Ægir's survival as a whole.

'Calmly'... you say?

We Ægir are not cold-blooded. Whenever you would feel wrath, our own hearts are far from unstirring.

These are feelings I had wished to convey to Gladiia, once upon a time, but I realized I had no right to.

Every decision I made for her, I based in pure rationality. How natural, then, that I lost that right. How dare I ask for an emotional pardon.

The same is true, even now.

And so, 'calmly,' I accept my own judgment.

......

The designated individual has been contacted. Advisor Blandus did not pick up.

......

Dr. Kal'tsit, Doctor. I am deeply sorry I could not give you an appropriate answer.

But right now, I ask that you permit me to carry out my duty.

Ah, awake?

I've taken care of your wounds. You'll find two doses of stimulant beside you, to bring you back to your senses. Shall I administer, or would you prefer the Little Handy?

......

Fine, do it yourself.

...Very practiced motions. It seems you've recuperated well.

Now, useless as I know it is, I do need to tell you this.

You cannot keep experimenting on yourself, or you'll have to cover your eyes as well to avoid looking like you've been tortured. The mask won't be enough, at least.

My wardrobe has nothing to do with my modifications.

True, you've always looked that way. We all got shivers as you entered the classroom and sat your gloomy self down.

All this time we've known each other, and you barely even show me your face.

Blandus. Given you've started cracking jokes, I take it the results are less than awful?

Now, that's tricky to say. The emotional ride I've been through felt like being seated next to Secunda as she sailed a patrol ship with both eyes shut. That is to say, utter madness.

......

First of all, I noticed a baffling effect in your auto-adaptive junction...

Your body's reaction is bizarre: when the Seaborn genes exert their abnormal dominance, your anti-Seaborn rejection response doesn't intensify. No, it actually lightens somewhat.

Which means my transformation is getting faster?

No, quite the opposite.

It was right as I was canceling the surgery that I observed a curious phenomenon. Once your rejection ebbed, your Seaborn genetics slowed down their influence.

As if, to be crude, your body and the Seaborn genes had reached some sort of understanding.

This is certainly worth further study. But for now, I need to know one thing: will this impact the Hunters in their upcoming battle?

Slaying the Firstborn will be our single most important operation since we were created.

At this point, I will allow no freak accidents.

I've observed no negative effects so far. I'll be setting up a few more risk assessments before you head out.

That said, if we're going to figure out what's underpinning this phenomenon, then you'd best come back alive so I have something to study at all.

I'll be honest, I'm anxious.

We've never waged a war on this scale before. We're marching every single Abyssal Hunter, plus three whole standing Legions, off into a single trench...

If not with a war like this, how would we ever kill their genesezoic, their source, their 'god'?

Do you truly believe we can polish off the Seaborn just like that, once and for all?

You've worked with us for over a decade, and you still have doubts about the Hunter project?

Do you want the truth?

......

The truth is, I should've vetoed this project at the audit stage. A roadmap to warping evolution, predicated on sacrificing our own people's humanity.

If not for you, I wouldn't have even entertained its feasibility, let alone poured ten years of my own blood and sweat into it.

...But it's a sunk cost now. The more I doubt it, the more crucial it is for me be its core member, to steer it with my own two hands.

Yet I can't shake the thought of how many 'monsters' this lab's created.

The majority of which were put down by your own two hands, Ulpianus.

Yes.

Their deaths don't even qualify as 'sacrifices' to you, do they?

A homeland ravaged by Seaborn will only wrest away even more Ægir lives.

We've had this debate a thousand times. We don't need another before I leave.

Get the risk assessments going. Furthermore, suspend all ongoing Hunter modification trials.

Come again?

With no Hunters present, it would be difficult to deal with any aberrant results.

'Aberrant.'

Ulpianus, you've been the director of the Abyssal Hunter project for its entire lifespan and even you can't be fully confident in it, can you?

That's the real reason you chose to be the first subject.

Can this campaign put the Seaborn crisis to rest? Yes or no? Even you can't be sure.

Blandus...

No, Ulpianus, I've spent each and every day hoping more than anyone that this will end in victory.

Maybe when you sail back, safe and sound, the project will have no more reason to exist. Think, we could even pick up where we left off on all our old research.

You barely even remember, do you? Well, I ran into our old teacher at the council. He asked about that dream of ours.

'The evolution of Ægir cells.'

It made for no particularly grand abstract, but glimpsing the whole course we've run from a microscopic cross-section? That's a beautiful pursuit, and no one can tell me otherwise.

From our ancestors swaying their limbs in the rivers eons ago, to us here and now as we debate science and ideals, there's a flow to it all. An order of events.

It's not too late for us to witness it, is it?

*cough* *cough*... You finally came, Ulpianus.

You won't even resort to flaunting your wretched sense of humor as a plea?

Hah, hah. Wretched sense of humor... Secunda would agree with you.

You know, she's really grown to resemble you over the years. I fear we'll have another you on our hands someday.

Along with the countless other yous, born by or against their will, throwing themselves into the fight against the Seaborn and perishing in combat, until the shores are soaked in Ægir's blood.

It grieves me how she's changed. The changes in you, though, I can barely begin to comprehend.

Stop what you're doing, right now, and explain your game to me.

Blandus, Cultist of the Deep.

You're late. I've hardly anything for you to stop now.

Just a moment ago, my holochart received a signal from Nest 37. The final beacon is activated, and the Class IV weapons are warming up.

You're not putting this one down, Ulpianus.

And if you hoped to learn what the Church is planning, I can't help you.

They were tripping over themselves to protect me out of their own wishful thinking, and then one day they just went and changed their minds.

If not for their actions, I know I might've been caught long ago. Know, though, I've never counted myself among their members. I can't even make heads or tails of their warped doctrine.

Still, if you're asking what drove me to do all this, I would love to bend your ear.

Excellent. Then I won't need to resort to violence.

Hahah! Violence.

Still taking that as your first impulse. If it weren't for the embarrassing situation you've put yourself in, I'm sure the Institute of Development Planning would love to have a chat with you.

Want to know something? It took only moments after the failed campaign for them to declare you all dead. Then, soon enough, the Institute came down to me with an invitation to restart the Hunter project.

......

You haven't seen the casualty report for that campaign yet, have you?

You should have a read. Abyssal Hunters, legionnaires... Their sacrifices, a tragedy, yet the ending a farce!

Violent resistance was always a dead end. The project was dead in the water from the start.

Granted, Ægir's never used crude platitudes or propaganda to encourage such sacrifice. Every one of the project's subjects was given the freedom to make an informed decision...

But using the sacrifice of our citizens as a market standard, well, THAT makes the very question of free choice much ado about nothing.

Once, an Ægir's worth lay in all that they had built up and created during their life. And now? Our very lives, even our deaths, are price-tagged.

I will record your words, even though it's pointless.

Blandus, I expected your suspicion and dissent to drive you to search deeper, not reduce you to the cowardly, self-deceiving man you are now.

Whether out of passion or mourning, it's still the same brand of rhetoric spouted by every fallen claiming to foresee the fall of Ægir itself.

Assigning a character to a nation, anthropomorphizing it to critique its values... Even as a method of inflating one's ego, it's shoddy at best.

But even as you weep over the senseless sacrifice, have you never imagined how many lives your destruction of the Waterway Program will take?

Destruction?

No, Ulpianus, I'm trying to open up a true path for us.

What have you done?

Now now, Ulpianus, be patient. I have nothing to hide.

See that? That's where the Hunters are right now.

They activated the last beacon, and are probably caught in a deadly struggle, but they aren't in any danger... any true danger, that is.

The moment they can fight no more, that's when the weapons kick in: the Seaborn will cease fighting. Every last one thronging one of them will fall asleep.

Keep going.

If you remember your auto-adaptive junction tech, you'll have no trouble understanding what I tell you next.

That old surgical accident I had?

Well, you were right, it was absolutely worth the further study.

The junction brought about a homeostasis in you on the microscopic level. Your body no longer rejected the Seaborn genes, and they miraculously stopped overtaking you.

It may have been by chance, but in no time at all, I was able to reproduce your phenomenon on the macro scale. To an extent, I could delete the hostility Seaborn bore towards humankind.

And before Gladiia's unit left for Nest 37, during their surgery, I took the opportunity to reproduce that 'accident' of yours.

......

You wanted to recreate in the Hunters an 'accident' with no proven explanation, no clear effects, and not even a trace of actual, rigorous verification?

No no no, what happened in your body has long since graduated from freak accident. While you were missing, I spent every waking moment on the research.

...I trusted you Hunters were still alive. Trusted you would come back, and that I could help you be free of that blasted 'fate' of yours.

But you refused to restart the Abyssal Hunter project. How did you...

Were you experimenting on yourself?

No wonder your body stinks of miasma.

Hahah, my physical condition doesn't hold a candle to yours, naturally.

I haven't much longer now, *cough* *cough*... I can practically feel each second of my life slipping away... but it was worth it. I've done all I needed to.

Tell me, Ulpianus, that the Hunters were born to be a solution. Not a tool, not a weapon, not a consumable destined to be tossed aside.

They were.

...Good.

Then the project was a failure, but the Hunters still have a chance to fulfill their calling... yet not through senseless slaughter and sacrifice.

You'll live to show your worth. Not die to give Ægir a few more final gasps.

The Abyssal Hunters will be the start of a revised relationship between humanity and the Seaborn. If I can have them mistake humankind as their own, then maybe I can get the many to see Ægir as a neighbor.

And you had your eyes on the Waterway Program all along.

More precisely, the Waterway Program came to me first.

Clementia reached out to me at practically the same time as the Institute. She let me in on both the gameplan for the Waterway Program, and the research project for the Class IV weapon array.

Weapons rooted in biotech like them can impact Seaborn behavior at large. The theory grounding them has a natural affinity with the auto-adaptive junctions.

By then, I'd already gathered the data I needed to perfect the junction tech. To the point that it was no longer limited to human subjects anymore.

So, I made a tiny little tweak to the Class IVs. The instant they activate, we can close the book on our fight with the Seaborn.

The Abyssal Hunters, the Class IVs, it'll all transcend the boundary of species. It'll become a path. A bridge.

You can't make this up. Two centuries of constant war between Ægir and the Seaborn, and one little trick is likely all it takes to stop it.

Maybe the severity of this war was a fiction from the very beginning. Now, I mean no offense to our predecessors, but at least we still have the power to choose a different path.

......

Not that I'll get to see it. The rest is out of my hands... At least I was lucky enough, in the end, to see you at the Sophontheatrum.

You're the one who started the Hunter project, you know your way around self-adaptive junctions, you've been through all this. Only you, Ulpianus, only you can keep the work going.

Is that why you were so blithely waiting for my arrival? To entrust your 'work' to me before you die?

It's my turn to invite you. Ægir and the Seaborn have a chance at achieving true symbiosis. Perhaps that's a future you wouldn't mind bearing witness to?

I refuse.

I did expect that, but still, that was a little too blunt.

Ulpianus, this is the control room where I'll die, but...

Blandus, even if your death is certain, you must know: you have no right to go regretting anything, fighting anything.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we ventured to make sense of the meaning of our existence by studying how our own Ægirian cells had evolved.

But you've ruined everything you had with your own hands, all for one wild flight of fancy.

The Seaborn are noxious scourge upon the ocean. There is no point in doubting that.

They are beings full of unknowns, yet you believe in 'symbiosis' with them, as if they are your friends?

Blandus, that is the same arrogance the Ægir had in assuming victory was inevitable. No, this is that a hundred times over.

Are you even aware of what you're thinking? Can you describe this hopeful vision you see, in your fantasies of 'symbiosis'?

Are the Seaborn to be magical seafloor fairies spoken of in children's stories, or will they be our beloved household pets?

Will Gladiia debate philosophy with them? Will Skadi take teatime with them? Will Laurentina be dancing with them?

......

......

You can't paint even a single proper picture, can you?

Your own proven record as the scientist you were, thrown away. When I see you now, Blandus, I can only laugh.

I've never heard you say so much in one breath, Ulpianus.

You mean to tell me you despair, yes?

The only one who ever despaired was you.

So you have no right to go regretting anything, fighting anything. Not in front of me.

Every fallen must be sentenced, and their every corpse should be hung from the dry reefs.

...Is it even in you to sentence me?

The campaign to slay the Firstborn was full of questionable points, and you stand as the greatest suspect. Everything you've done now puts you at odds with Ægir—

This nation has rejected you.

And so I have no choice but to take on your noble work?

The man I knew would never have given this conman's rhetoric.

I'm simply stating the facts.

Then in this moment, the last I will ever spend as an Ægir, I sentence you.

......