Chapter 306: 306. My Head Is Killing Me Hearing All Of This Bullshit! (I Want To Kill Them!)

“So four individuals lacking direct expertise,” Rex said, “examined anomalous data, compared it to historical files, and concluded it was merely rocks moving.”

“The comparison was thorough.”

“You had a meeting with the council,” Rex said. “You reviewed the data and concluded it was geological.”

“Yes,” Mordecai replied.

“And no one thought to consult an expert to verify that conclusion?” Rex asked.

Mordecai remained silent.

“There are individuals in your territory who analyze second-stratum threshold data professionally,” Rex stated. “I know this information because your monitoring sector is operational.”

“Someone established it! Someone trained the personnel to utilize it!”

Mordecai said, “The specialists assigned to that sector were…”

He stopped.

Rex waited.

“WHAT?!” Rex screamed right at his face until he jumped out of fear.

“T-t-t-they were reassigned,” Mordecai said, “…d-d-d-during the northern sector… restructuring.”

“When the fuck was the restructuring?”

“Approximately four years ago.”

Rex fixed his gaze on him, allowing the weight of that number to linger in the air for a moment before speaking again.

“Four years ago, you restructured the northern sector,” Rex said. “You relocated the specialists and assigned the monitoring record to a new council member after just one briefing.”

“Then, two months ago, when the data indicated something you didn’t comprehend, you convened a meeting with four others who also didn’t grasp it, and you all decided it was acceptable.”

Mordecai said nothing.

“Two months ago,” Rex said. “Two full months where a second-stratum civilization was testing your threshold boundary, and your council decided it was rock moving.”

He turned away from Mordecai, not because he was finished, but because remaining still while contemplating all the carelessness that had occurred required a physical outlet. Turning was preferable to whatever the other option entailed.

He put his hand over his mouth.

’Six generations… a hundred and forty years…’

’One briefing… Four individuals in a room, unaware of what they were observing, yet documenting that everything was fine.’

He walked three steps to the left.

’The monitoring constructs had been logging for sixty years, and the data had been stagnant. The data was stagnant, similar to a fire that remains hidden within a wall, unnoticed until the wall ignites.’

’The individuals responsible for reading that data had been reassigned four years ago—not replaced, just relocated—as if the sector they came from operated under the assumption that nothing would ever need to be reviewed.’

He stopped walking and pressed two fingers against his temple.

’These fucking individuals,’ he thought. ’These absolute, catastrophic, unbelievable fucking useless shits.’

He turned and walked three steps to the right.

’The Underlayer was old…’

That was the thing that kept hitting him from the side every time he thought he had already absorbed it. The Underlayer was old and large and had existed long enough to develop something that functioned like institutional memory.

Somehow, the result of the institutional memory was a council that held a meeting, reviewed threshold data that none of its members were qualified to interpret, and wrote the word “geological” in a report that was never checked by anyone outside that room.

He stopped again.

’Pavellia had flagged the issue… As the newest member of the council, she had received only one briefing and no follow-up conversations, yet she was the only person in fourteen months to examine the data and think, ’Something about this is strange.’”

’The reward for her instinct was a council meeting where four more experienced but ultimately unhelpful members explained to her that there was nothing strange about it… they insisted it was just rocks.’

’Like… WHAT THE FUCK!’

’ARE THEY ALL BRAIN-DEAD OR SOME SHIT?!’

He put his hand down.

’But still… these were not the actions of a security apparatus.’ Rex gritted his teeth. ’This was also not how something that took itself seriously operated.’

’This was the institutional behavior of an organization that had been safe for so long it had forgotten what safety was supposed to protect against… it was the shit kind of organization that built tripwires and then stopped walking the perimeter.’

’That trained specialists and then moved them somewhere else…’

’That filed a shaft connection in a cabinet and left it there for a hundred and forty years on the working assumption that ’inconvenient’ meant the same thing as ’harmless.’”

He walked two steps forward, then stopped, and turned back around to face the wall again.

’Frauds…’ he thought. ’Not malicious… not even incompetent in the dramatic way that at least implied someone had tried something and failed…’

’They’re just frauds… the fraud involved a slow, administrative, and completely mundane process in which the system continued to give the illusion of functioning, even though the actual operations had quietly ceased during a restructuring four years ago, and no one noticed because the forms were still being filed.’

He exhaled through his nose.

’The second stratum had been testing the threshold for three months…’ Rex glanced around at the demon guards. ’For three months, they had been knocking on the door, yet the individuals tasked with noticing such disturbances merely exchanged glances in a meeting room, concluding it was just the house settling.’

For about three seconds, he stood facing the wall at the end of the hall.

’Maybe I’ll just have to kill him and the entire individuals that are in the underlayer because of how useless shits they are…’

Then he turned around and walked straight up to Mordecai at a pace that wasn’t too fast or too slow.

Mordecai jumped.

’Nah… I’ll have to hear more of this bullshit so that I have a reason to fucking kill this motherfucker and end some of his fraud’s council or any of those shits…’

“Keep going,” Rex said.

Pavellia stepped forward, and her voice was steady in a way that Mordecai’s voice had stopped being.

“With all due respect, I am here to speak on behalf of my lord,” she said, bowing to Rex.

Rex glanced at her. “Go on.”

“Allow me to introduce myself first…”

“My name is Pavellia Vostara,” she said. “I am the Queen of the Sunrift Peacock Clan, located in the eastern part of the Underlayer, although that was hundreds of years ago.”

“I was summoned to serve Mordecai-sama’s council because my clan’s territory shares a border with the northern monitoring sector, and the access it gave us to the monitoring network was useful for our own territorial interests.”

Rex said, “You joined the council so you could use the monitoring network.”

“I joined the council because my clan’s land is next to the area where strange things have been happening for three years,” she said. “I was able to protect my people because I had access to the monitoring network.”

Rex asked, “What have you found?”

Pavellia took the documentation tablet out of her clothes. She held it with the skill of someone who had planned out the information ahead of time, and she had.

“The second-stratum pressure signatures started about three years ago,” she said. “Not three months…”

“The first period of activity was so small that it didn’t set off the constructs’ standard alert threshold, which is set for Underlayer-level movement instead of cross-stratum pressure.”

“I found the early signatures when I looked at the records of my clan’s border zone.”

Rex looked at her.

He said, “You have known about this for three years.”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on it for three years,” she said. “I formally brought it to Lord Mordecai’s attention eight months ago, when the council session I mentioned was scheduled.”

“The council’s geological assessment was not the conclusion I had reached.”

“And what did you come to?” Rex asked.

“That the boundary was being tested by groups with a planned, long-term way of doing things,” she said. “The pressure intervals were regular, which geological changes don’t cause.”

“Over the course of three years, the frequency went up by about forty percent, and the pressure magnitude went up by about sixty percent.”

She stopped for a moment.

“Something was working toward crossing the threshold.” She said, “Patiently… without a sense of urgency.”

“It was the kind of patience that comes from waiting long enough that a few more months don’t matter.”

Rex let that sit for a while.

“You flagged it eight months ago.” He said, “The council decided it was geological two months ago, and you didn’t say anything after that.”

“I kept watching,” Pavellia said. “When the shaft activity started six weeks ago, I started comparing the second-stratum signatures with the northern shaft movement data.”

“Six weeks,” Rex said.

“Yes,” she said. “The second-stratum entities crossed the threshold six weeks ago.”

“The monitoring constructs in the shaft detected their movement starting from that point…”

“The four signatures that entered the northern shaft a week ago were not exploratory in the way Lord Mordecai described them.”

“They were the culmination of a six-week infiltration approach.”

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