--
Stay connected via empire
[Welcome to DAO 101, also known as Defense Against Outsiders. I am a system AI named March, and I will serve as your mentor for this class.]
'Well, I guess that answers my question as to why the class schedules were flexible. It turns out that they left the teaching to the AI.'
Cedric was in Site Delta right now; more specifically, he's in one of the training rooms available. Even though he's taking a class, he's not required to be in a classroom. Even more so with this subject, considering that it will teach all he needs to know in order to deal with outsiders.
But of course, he can't expect to be taught techniques right away. It's his first official day of training to be a security officer, and just like everybody else who came before him, he has to start with the basics.
[We will first begin by learning what Outsiders are.]
[Outsiders are creatures that have been theorized to predate the establishment of the Scarlet Dust Alliance. Some even say that they are older than the primordial chaos, the very creation itself.]
[Either way, the existence of outsiders poses a threat to living beings like you.]
[Outsiders are creatures of the Void. They are mindless, only moving through sheer instinct. And that instinct is to extinguish all life they come across. They represent the antithesis of life; they have the ability to reduce life to nihility, removing any possibilities of rebirth or reincarnation.]
[They are relentless, indifferent, have no concept of exhaustion, and there's possibly no end to them.]
[Even with the long and extensive research of the alliance, we only know a few key information about their existence. It is difficult to know more because that requires venturing deep into the Void, a place that swallows all life.]
[The Void is like a black hole in the form of a fog that's isolated outside of the Primeval Scarlet Dust Realm. It is unaccepting of any living beings from the primordial chaos. It just reduces anything from here into nothingness without any hopes of retrieval.]
[To make things worse, the Void consistently erodes the borders of the realm. It constantly gnaws at creation itself, slowly but surely chipping away at it, making it smaller and smaller each time. [What hastens this pace is the invasion of the outsiders at places close to the barriers that isolate us from them.]
[Our realm has a natural resistance against the Void and its creatures. But that resistance only goes so far. It almost becomes useless when the void takes on an active role against it.]
[Instead, please pay attention to the dark, foul air surrounding its body.]
[You have probably sensed it by now. If you did, good. You're perceptive enough for this work. If not, then you really need to train your senses more.
[Anyway, that dark, foul air is the fog of Void. It serves as their lifeline and the key to their abstruse strength. Outsiders cannot survive without it, and it doesn't belong anywhere within our realm. So, if you saw it, then you're safe to assume that there's an outsider nearby.]
'It's like demon corruption all over again...'
[To deal with an outsider, you must cleanse this Fog of Void.]
[There are plenty of ways to do this. Most of which I will be teaching you in this class, and you are expected to perform all of them to a certain degree of mastery if you want to pass this subject.]
[There are tons of simple means to do so and a few advanced techniques as well. Since this is just the beginning of your training here, we will focus more on the fundamentals and the simple ways to clear the fog of Void.]
[If you successfully clear the fog of Void, the Void Creature will lose most of its fighting capabilities. It will then act and behave like a cornered beast, so you can't drop your guard just yet.]
[You must know that you only have an hour at best to kill the Outsider before the Fog of Void reappears in its body. It must be killed in a single go because if it was given a chance to escape, it will become more alert and far more dangerous than the first time you encountered it.]
[Void creatures can and will evolve. They do so by simply existing, and it expedited as it devoured or withered life around it. In our research so far, we do not know if it has a ceiling on how strong it could get. We only know that the longer it has the chance to exist within this realm, the stronger it gets. And that is an accident that must be prevented by all means necessary, so as a security officer, you must be alert and ready.]
'Yeah, no pressure at all.' Cedric sarcastically muttered in his mind while rolling his eyes.
As expected, Cedric was right to not expect any practical learning on his first day. The system AI was focused on explaining the basic information of what he's about to deal with. It described the Void Creatures, their environment, behaviors, and other details about them to give him a complete understanding of the threat this realm was facing.
Hell, it even gave him a quiz afterwards, which certainly took him back to his academic days.
Of course he perfected that quiz. He had a sharp memory after all. He just didn't expect that the lesson for today concluded after that because it hasn't been long since the class started.
'Oh well, I'd be a hypocrite to complain.'