Uzochi didn’t know about the Swirling Swarm, at least not more than vaguely. Ty thought it was odd for a mont, but given that the Origin Cycle seed more connected to the Chaotic Congloration there was all of the Exalted Quadrant and the Scarlet Midfields between their outdated information and the Trigold Cluster. Ty didn’t know of anything of note east of the Trigold Cluster, so it was pretty much the sa.
He had heard of Korin and Zaur, though. It wasn’t long before Nekesa and Makinia were interrogating Ty again. All he could do was tell them what he knew.
“I wasn’t there for either of them,” he pointed out. “That all happened in the upper realms. But I do know it happened.”
“How certain can you be about each of these?” Makinia asked.
Ty held himself straight. “One hundred percent. Our allies wouldn’t lie to us. Plus, most of them are recorded.”
“Clearly your scholars would wish to log such information for the future,” Makinia agreed. “But such records are as fallible as those who write them.”
Ty shook his head. “I don’t an written. Well, obviously people wrote it down too. I an recorded. Video? You guys have tech too, so…” Tech based words were probably chosen after the language diversion. He could just show them what he ant.
Ty just pulled out his portable comm. He could play pretty much any video, but he wanted to pick a good one. Though while he was at it, he might as well see if he could find a relevant one. The problem was that most weren’t in local storage. He didn’t have the full video for any of them, but… he did have a clip of Zaur’s death. It ca with the caption ‘Citadel of Exalted Light gets Exploded Right’. The energy signature was pretty shaky, but it was good enough.
“Here. This.”
Ty had just assud that the Origin Cycle had also invented video with their other tech. It seed pretty basic to him, though perhaps that wasn’t true.
Nekesa watched intently. It was a very short clip, so she’d barely focused when it began to loop. “Is that all?”
“I don’t keep all our data on my comm,” Ty shrugged. Not that he could. Even if the storage space was vast, the quantity of data the Alliance had access to was exponentially more.
“A moving picture with audio accompanint,” Makinia said.
“Yeah. A video,” Ty said. “At least, that’s what we call it.”
Makinia frowned. “We might call it a full sensory experience. Though yours is a bit short in so areas. That energy impression, however, is quite rare.”
Ty nodded. “It’s really data intensive,” he said. “At least if you want it to be right.” That was about the limit of his knowledge. “Anyway, that was Zaur. He exploded in the skies of Xankeshan so people have this shot from literally a million angles, in differing quality. It was an attack on his anchor that finished him off, though.”
“Apologies,” Makinia comnted. “I did not an to doubt you, but it is a… rather monuntal statent that four Domination cultivators have died.”
“By our hands,” Ty emphasized. “It should be seven total, now. Assuming the Swirling Swarm cultivators were separate. Two of them, Cynbel, Shelach, Korin, Zaur, and Sudin. So four or five for our greater alliance and then one for Ratna and finally Everheart.”
“Who?”
“Ratna? She’s a Domination cultivator. Sect head of the Guardians of the Veiled Brilliance.”
Nekesa shook her head. “We were aware of their existence, at least. What about this Everheart?”
“Oh, you don’t know him?” Ty chuckled. “I guess there’s no reason you should. He’s pretty recent too. Showed up on the scene maybe a few centuries before our Alliance.” It wasn’t Ty’s job to ntion he ca from one of their worlds too. “Mostly he’s a powerful asshole. He’s good at making enemies. He’s got his own faction and causes all sorts of trouble.”
Ty was pretty sure all of this information was still public. Acknowledging the existence of Domination cultivators and that they’d been killed was fine. He probably shouldn’t go too much into particular techniques that allowed that to happen, though.
The two sisters seed to want to discuss whether they thought he was lying among themselves. It was a lot of information to digest all at once, Ty supposed. He’d sort of been exposed to it over a long period of ti so he got used to it.
-----
The long period of waiting was over. It took slightly longer than Ty thought for the ssage to return to him, but his calculations might have been off by a day or two.
“Partial ssage received. So text corruption. You are authorized to use your own judgnt on matters of technological secrecy. You may negotiate for alternative thods of transport as you see fit. So of your ssage indicated the system was hidden, so this ssage has been boosted. If possible, confirm receipt. Do not force an end to isolation.”
“Uzochi!” Ty called out. “You can look at my ship now.”
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The man moved faster than it seed possible for soone of his cultivation to move. He hadn’t just been standing around waiting, but he was never terribly far from the landing pad.
“How does this-”
“If it’s not the guns or the wings, I barely know,” Ty headed him off imdiately. “Maybe the comms. But the subspace drive is out of my comprehension.”
“Were you not able to open up subspace yourself?”
“I know how to cut open subspace,” Ty said. “And I know that the ship doesn’t do that. Anyway, what I want most is an assessnt on if you can fix any of this stuff. Or replace it with anything interstellar capable. Alternatively, if people are willing to let call so people here or to a neighboring system we can probably get fixed up in a couple months with ssage timing and travel and stuff.”
“Your ships move so quickly?” Uzochi asked. “That would be tens of lightyears per day, would it not?”
“I was kind of assuming so people with the necessary stuff would be in the neighborhood,” Ty admitted. “It would certainly be a lot longer otherwise.”
The Origin Cycle might wish to keep their location secret, and Ty would respect that… but Ty knew that sowhere in Lower Realms Alliance systems the system was already tagged. And listed as secret. Most things would show it as explored and uninteresting, but so people would know. Even if he had disappeared entirely upon entering their domain, as his last known trajectory it would have been logged.
But they could still choose to remain a part of things. That said, Ty was going to try to convince them to do otherwise. If nothing else to put an upper bounds on the tiline for his ship getting fixed. A year or two wouldn’t be too bad, if it ca down to it, but he wasn’t planning to settle here long term.
-----
Ty’s ship was halfway taken apart when the third distortion beast showed up. This ti, local systems sensed it before he did. That was partially due to it being quite different from the second appearance in terms of having no sword intent at all… and also due to them having recalibrated their systems.
He didn’t get ssaged directly, but he heard the alarms blaring and followed Nekesa to her ship. “Where’s the best place for to stand?” he asked.
“You don’t need to-”
“I like fighting,” he said. “I’ll pick sowhere out of easy line of fire of most of your weapons. You can just let drift once we’re up there.” Nekesa might have been asking if he was certain when he jumped into his chosen position. “You’d better get this ship moving, right?”
“It’s not as close this ti,” Nekesa hedged. “But we’d best not delay.”
“Three in a week is definitely more than normal, right?”
“Yes. And three is-” Nekesa stopped herself.
Ty had the right sort of insight to pick out what she tried to avoid there. “Any problems with your other planets?” He knew that Forinti wasn’t their only one.
“They will be fine,” Nekesa declared. Sotis, saying sothing helped it co true.
As the ship took off, Ty waved to one of the gun ports. He presud that whoever was manning it could either see or at least sense his presence. It would be weird for the weapons to be actually blind.
The guns weren’t all that similar to what he was used to, but they were recognizable as weapons. They seed to focus on more esoteric energies and pretty much never had kinetic projectiles. It took so special effort to make the latter worth it, but when they worked they were great.
As their ship approached the distortion beast, Ty tried to figure out what its deal was. The first thing he was worried about was whether it had problematic insights. It was hard to say without having seen it act, though. It felt… different. But not like a weapon.
Ty got a pretty good view as a vine grew from a neighboring ship. They were flying a few hundred ters apart, not exactly a tight formation, but that was close in both cultivator and space terms. His instincts told him to chop it off. They weren’t usually wrong, and he had his sword with him for a reason. The sa reason as always.
His sword lashed out, but he withdrew his swing as he was about to hit the ship’s barriers. Fortunately, part of the vine extended beyond so he still managed to do sothing. If he’d been more prepared, he would have used the vine as an infiltration thod inside the barrier. Most Alliance ships could let his energy bypass, but he didn’t think the Origin Cycle was set up for him specifically if they even had the tech. Maybe he should ask.
A two ter section of vine was lopped off, but several tis that length flailed around striking at the very ship it grew from. Ty focused his vision on his eyes, and was glad to find that the vine hadn’t leeched away materials from the ship itself. But it also didn’t feel like a limb of a distortion beast.
It was more like… an energy technique. Ty didn’t make that judgnt off of a single incident, but rather from the dozens or hundreds of attacks that happened nearly simultaneously.
Without a clear target for the distortion beast’s actual body, he began to chop off the bits and pieces that were cropping up outside Nekesa’s ship. Inside the ship… well, fortunately the cultivators there reacted quickly enough.
Ty noticed that simply chopping the vines off wasn’t enough. They still flailed around, full of natural energy and willing to smash things with it. He could chop them into little pieces and the energy would disperse, but that was tireso. However, if he intentionally severed the connection it was different. It contained a little bit of Negation, a couple hints of the Spirit Slicing Sect, and so of his own general sword insights.
The technique was a bit sloppy, not easily perford consecutively, but he found it was efficient enough to make the distortion beast’s life harder. At least, for anything outside the ships and close enough to him. He was inside the barrier of Nekesa’s ship, but the other ones he had more trouble with… until the vines began damaging the barrier themselves.
Ships began to be torn apart. It was a disaster. Hopefully, the sort that many people would live through and use to accelerate their growth. At least the Origin Cycle had developed space suits, and their cultivators had properly suited up. Ty tended to find them restrictive, and he could regulate his own body just fine. That was a matter of difference in cultivation, though. Even Nekesa would have found the effort a bit burdenso.
The early warning had allowed other Cycle cultivators to prepare their own ships as well. Similar to before, so remained closer to the planet as a defensive asure. Others were battling the distortion beast in their own way- including so that tried to transmit their attacks through the growing vines. They weren’t entirely unsuccessful either.
Ty realized he’d been a bit uncharitable with so of his assessnts of the local cultivators. They were certainly weaker individually, but that was an issue of ti and training. They had survived this long, however, so they weren’t without their own thods. Even if these distortion beast attacks were a bit… uncommon.
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