Liberi Reader

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...

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.