Chapter 414: Four balls, no cone, a terrible ice cream

Chapter 414: Four balls, no cone, a terrible ice cream

Sofia approached the last door in the corridor which she had yet to open. It was another of the metallic doors without a handle, but when she came close, it did not open by itself.

Is this one broken? Maybe its locked somehow?

Looking around for a button to press or something like it, Sofia found nothing.

This doesnt leave many options I can try graveyarding my way in, maybe, but that might break the electrical things around. I could just brute force it, probably; it looks like rather regular steel, a good punch or two and itll break.

Might make a mess though.

Eh Ill just cut through.

Sofia grabbed her dagger and started cutting out a rectangle in the door following the doorframe. The blade cut through the steel like through paper. In the end the cut looked more like a big oval, because the dagger cut so well that it could draw curves in the steel without issue, so Sofia cut a roundish hole in a single big motion. The round plate of door she cut out fell backwards on Sofias face, hitting her forehead with a bong sound like a gong.

The door piece disappeared in Sofias eye storage.

That was embarrassing

Luckily there was no one around to see it, although Pareth had undoubtedly been watching through her eyes.

Lets see This looks a bit like the administrative office in Kulis guild. Desks and paper everywhere

The room was a rectangle, with no other doors, there were desks lined up against every wall, all covered in papers and things Sofia couldnt make much sense of. In the center was a round table-like thing mirrored on the ceiling, as if a big column in the center of the room had been cut and only the base and top were left.

This looks like another electrical device. It looks important I should see if I can make it work.

First thing first, Sofia walked to the desks and picked up a loose page of paper covered in black ink scribbles.

What is this A coded language?

The page was covered in signs made of a bunch of lines and circles.

This Doesnt look like any language that I know of There is clearly the usual punctuation in there, though, and numbers are just written as usual. A language from the Hero admins world, maybe? Or just one Ive never heard about.

I have no clue how to even start trying to read this.

Sofia rummaged through the stacks and stacks of paper around the room. Most of the papers used the same symbols to write, but Sofia picked up a few things from them, still. First of all, there were two people using these symbols, with quite different handwriting styles, one of them being looking a bit more approximative than the other. But that was not all, there were plenty of mathematical drawings and calculations along with the unknown language. Much of it, Sofia couldnt make sense of, and even line graphs which should be relatively easy to understand, she couldnt read the legend of.

Sofia ripped out the page Bookie presented her with, and the mana mist coming out from the book spread around the lobby before solidifying as the elven engineer skeleton. As the mist spread out, the lights throughout the entire house started flickering, and weird sounds came from the kitchen area, but it calmed back down when the skeleton was fully formed.

That was almost bad. I was right to be careful until now.

She stored the skeleton and made her way back to the work room to brief the skeleton before letting him out.

So, you need to activate the thing in the middle of the room. Dont use any magic and try to stay as far away from it as you can. You guys lose some mana over time so youll break things if youre out too long, try to be fast.

Sofia unloaded the Engineer skeleton in a corner of the room on top of a desk.

The skeleton stood in place and observed the thing from where he was, tilting his upper body to get different angles. Visibly not finding anything either, he ran on the desks to go to another corner of the room. He only needed to look for a second from this angle before jumping down and quickly poking at the machine with a finger, bringing it to life under Sofias eyes. His job done, he jumped back to the corner.

Huh?!

Sofia was on the other side of the room so she had no idea what exactly the Engineer had done, but evidently it had worked, so she thanked him and stored him back to avoid his mana interfering with the contraption which was now lighting up with a soft green light coming from within.

Curious, Sofia searched where the skeleton had poked at and it was quite easy to find, as a carving which had previously been hard to even see was now the sole thing that had lit up on that area of the machine. It was a weird sign of a bar piercing through a circle.

So there was actually a damn button! Why make it so hard to see Its not sticking out from the surface, not even a tiny bit. Bar and circle Must be the same language as those papers again.

As Sofia was looking around for other hidden buttons, the actual purpose of the machine revealed itself, a three dimensional image of something started appearing in the air above the machine, drawn line by line from the bottom up.

Sofia curiously watched the image appear line by line. For now, it looked like a misshapen white bowl, which kept extending up. After a few more seconds, Sofia understood.

Cerberus beta. This is just like what Kyle showed us in the shuttle! An image of the world But white. Its from before they made it a livable place The image quality isnt great but woah. Kyle wasnt lying, it was a frozen hellscape. Everythings white! Its all ice!

Slowly, the old form of the planet took shape, and when it was completely drawn, fully covered in white ice, it suddenly shrunk down, and more things started appearing around it.

First were the gray debris rings around the planet, which looked exactly like how Sofia remembered them in Kyles own representation of the planet, then, after the planet shrunk again until it was the size of a small seed came a first moon, second, and third moon, all very tiny dots of light at that scale, and quite far from the planet. Circles of green light then appeared each piercing through a moon and circling around the planet.

Orbit trajectory, Im familiar with this stuff now.

After a few seconds, the planets representation grew to its first size again, the moons grew with it, and came to line themselves up near the planet, allowing for easy viewing of everything in a single place, even if things were no longer to scale.

The image stabilized, and Sofia logically assumed that this was all there was to the image, but more lines started appearing again.

Theres more?

The lines were drawing something new beyond the moons.