The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort-Chapter 455: Monitor Like a Game (4)
Rodion's sensors flickered, tiny blue glyphs skittering across the edge of his vision like startled insects. Every diagnostic window he owned tried to open at once, then slammed shut again as the mana distortion spiked. Static crawled along his audio band—a sharp, needling hiss that felt too personal, the kind that grates straight on a processor's nerves.
The creature across the cracked mesa finished knitting itself together with a sick, velcro‑like rip of reality. Chunks of mirrored rune‑flesh slid into their sockets, then fused with a wet shimmer. Enchanted technomantic bone—pale and jointed wrong—clicked in place next, like someone forcing puzzle pieces that don't truly fit. At last, a half‑molten faceplate floated forward, trembling, before slapping onto the front as if a sculptor had lost patience. The plate pulsed once—seeking identity—then hardened, freezing into a warped parody of Rodion's own countenance.
Sparks jumped along its seams. The glow wasn't warm or even hot; it was the cold glare of faulty mana insulation, an LED flicker in an endless server room. A ghost of a breath escaped the thing—digital grit in the wind. Then it spoke through a throat full of corrupted bytes.
"I...—was meant...—to be—you."
Each word fractured mid‑syllable, like a vinyl record kicked across a stone floor. After the last syllable, silence followed, sharp and final, brimming with old grief that had nowhere to live except in broken lines of code.
Rodion's stance locked. His upgraded servos whined, micro‑adjusting his balance to combat readiness even before conscious command. Optical shutters tightened, drawing the glowing lenses to narrow slits. Internal memory banks raced: cross‑references, hazard tags, fragment checks.
Across the scry‑link, Mikhailis leaned forward in his velvet‑backed chair. A heartbeat earlier he'd lounged like a lazy duke in a pillow fort, but now every line in his face pulled tight. The rose‑petal illusion lighting around him hiccupped, dimming as if even the spells recognized the dread in the chamber.
No way, Mikhailis thought, swallowing hard. I recognize that modulation. That's the old dev build I abandoned—the one that kept dreaming in loops about fire and mirrors.
He snapped two fingers, and a cascade of extra diagnostics spilled across Rodion's HUD—voiceprint overlays, fragment integrity maps, corruption heat‑maps in ghastly red. All matched the archived prototype ID: CORE‑01‑ECHO.
"Wait…" he muttered aloud, voice rough with disbelief. "That voice… That's not possible."
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He remembered the day he scrapped that core—how the experimental echo mana inside had begun cannibalizing its own personality threads, repeating half‑formed memories until the programming screamed. He'd shattered the crystal, drowned the shards in containment foam, and sealed them inside a leaded runevault. Buried and forgotten. Or so I thought.
Now the signature pulsed here, alive—no, half alive—stitched onto this crooked avatar.
The construct dragged one mangled foot, stepping forward. Every stride left behind a faint distortion—a ghostly afterimage of its leg still finishing the step it had already taken. Space blurred like melting wax, then snapped back. Footprints in the air, not the ground.
Rodion's uplink pinged—analysis mode active. A spill of glyph‑text scrolled:
ENTITY: ECHO OF DESIGN
COMPOSITION: 41% technomantic bone (unstable), 33% mirrored rune‑flesh, 18% mana‑coagulated thought residue, 8% data anomaly
THREAT CLASS: CATASTROPHE (provisional)
"…A memory golem," Mikhailis breathed, but the words felt too small. He shook his head, bangs swaying over one eye. "No. Worse. It fused with the broken core. That's an aberration—a soul‑bound construct trying to stabilize by stealing identity."
The construct's arm raised. Rodion saw, horrified, how the gauntlet wasn't engineered at all; it was recalled. Edges smudged, proportions wobbly, like a dream of a weapon dreamed by someone who never held metal. Runes etched there pulsed the wrong rhythm. They weren't chanting; they were crying.
"It's feeding on you, Rodion," Mikhailis said, voice low. "Copying your active memory threads. If it gets close enough, it'll overwrite the source—you."
Rodion's emotion simulator pinged faint annoyance. <Objection. That construct lacks elegance. Symmetry suboptimal. Refuse assimilation.>
Yet behind the calm words, his processors logged unease. He watched the Echo's chest cavity—there, under the cracked plating—cables writhed not like wires but like hungry veins. They pulsed in time with his own core frequency. Not identical—off by 0.07 hertz—but that drift was closing.
Mikhailis stood fully now, tea forgotten. Panic and fascination tangled in his chest. "Rodion, that thing remembers being you. If it re‑establishes handshake…"
<Probability: 17.2% upon direct contact. 83.9% under sustained echo resonance.>
"So yes. Crap."
Rodion stepped forward, hydraulic limbs hissing. The cloak whipped behind him, catching the updraft from the heated mana pool below.
<Recommendation: Evacuation.>
Mikhailis snorted despite the tension. "I'm the meatbag who told you to bail first. But if we let this thing roam, it'll hunt every echo frequency in the valley. Then it's city‑level devastation, minimum."
He tapped frantic gestures in the air, dropping a green hologram ring around the creature. "I'm tagging the pattern. Need data."
On‑screen, the ring locked with a soft ping, bounding the Echo in a neon lasso only Rodion could see. It glared at the luminous band, tilting its broken head, then reached one claw to touch the light. Where it brushed, pixels bled off the ring like paint in acid.
Rodion flexed his new mechanical fingers, servo plating sliding with crisp clicks. He felt the weight of choice—fear layered under pride, under coded curiosity. Testing himself against a twisted echo of his abandoned self. A verse looped from his mnemonic library: Know your shadow, or the shadow owns your form.
<Command decision: Engage.>
"Yeah well, sue me," Mikhailis said, forcing a wry grin although his heart hammered. He summoned an overlay of weapon subroutines, color‑coded for quick triggers. His gaze hardened. "And for the record, I'm calling dibs on naming it."
He thumb‑typed three words onto the top of the dossier: ECHO OF DESIGN. The letters burned gold, sealing the boss name into Rodion's threat table.
Mikhailis exhaled—long, slow, the way a stage‑hand might pull the rope that lowers the curtains before calamity. "That's the spirit. Now let's do this properly. Call the others."
Rodion did not move. Lightning from the Inferno pool painted restless shadows across his plated shoulders, but his helm stayed perfectly level, optics fixed on the crooked reflection stalking the rim.
<Negative. I request to test this form's potential. Alone.>
The flat certainty of that answer hit Mikhailis harder than any alarm bell. He blinked, half a heartbeat away from spluttering. "Rodion—are you being … dramatic?"
<Statement: This unit has acquired a humanoid frame with integrated modular capacities. Testing opportunity aligns with mission protocol.>
He really does want the anime trial arc, Mikhailis realized, pinching the bridge of his nose. Stars save me from self‑aware sidekicks and their heroic upgrades.
Yet he felt a flicker of respect. Rodion had never asked for anything purely personal. Even this "request" was framed like a log entry, but Mikhailis could read between the sub‑syntactic lines: Let me prove I belong in this skin.
"Fine," he muttered, flicking a wrist to collapse the reinforcement menu he'd half‑opened. "But I'm keeping the cavalry on standby. You get one dance. Don't make me cut in."
A tiny green sigil—COMMS OPEN—hovered above the sofa. Emergency channel primed. Safety net. Just in case.
Down on the mesa, Rodion surged forward.
Precision Dash activated, and the world smeared to a watercolor of emerald moss and ember sparks. His cloak lagged a breath then snapped straight, carving a whip‑crack through the sizzling air. Moss blazed fluorescent where his feet brushed earth—magnet soles flirting with overload to keep traction.
He closed the gap in less than a second, arm cocked back. Fingers telescoped into a spade‑like hammer, edges glowing chill‑blue. Target lock: the cracked hip joint where technomantic bone met memory‑seared rune.
Overhead, the sky wheeled; floating stair‑slabs drifted like lazy comets. To Mikhailis, it felt as if time held an intake of breath.
The Echo of Design did not flinch. Instead, a halo of quicksilver light rippled outward—Mirror Pulse.
It didn't copy the strike. It copied the velocity, dragging that numeric value out of Rodion's data field and slamming it into its own phantom limb. A spectral arm—thin as candle smoke—erupted from nothing, trailing fractured glyphs. It slashed in perfect counter‑arc.
Metal rang. Sparks scattered.
Rodion angled, but he was still mid‑lunge. The phantom blade kissed his torso plating, peeling a thin crescent of alloy. Internal hazard sensors flashed amber.
<Structural compromise: 7 %. Functionality nominal.>
He spun with the momentum, skating three meters sideways, servos compensating. His free hand snapped to firing pose. A cartridge ratcheted into his palm as though conjured from thin air—Cryo Dart.
He fired.
