The mine entrance was much tidier than it had been a few days earlier.
Most of the rubble had been cleared away, exposing the buried mine entrance beneath. The supports had been replaced with new timber, which still smelled of resin and had yet to be coated in preservative oil.
A section of track had been repaired, and the mine carts had been set back on the rails. Fresh lubricant on their axles gleamed in the sunlight. Several miners squatted by the entrance, resting with bowls of water in their hands, coal dust and sweat streaking their faces with black.
When they saw Black Owl approaching, they looked up at him, then lowered their heads again. It was not that they did not care. They had no energy left to care.
They worked from morning to night, moving rocks, digging earth, and carrying timber. Every joint in their bodies protested. If they could sit, they would never stand; if they could close their eyes, they would never keep them open.
Black Owl passed them without drawing any extra attention. His black construct armor looked somewhat conspicuous in broad daylight, but a mine had far too many conspicuous things-collapsed rock faces, crooked shaft frames, mountains of rubble, and rust-covered mine carts.
Among all those things, a person clad in full black armor was not particularly strange.
The mine tunnel ran deep, growing darker the farther he went.
The lighting crystals on the walls had just been replaced. Their pale blue fluorescence spread small halos through the air, just enough to illuminate the path underfoot.
The air was damp, carrying a strong, musty smell, as though no breeze had passed through in a very long time. The rubble underfoot grew thicker. In places, it was piled almost as high as the overhead supports, forcing Black Owl to stoop to get through.
He passed the site of the cave-in. A narrow passage had already been cleared through it, with rubble still piled on either side, waiting to be carried away.
A thick timber support hung overhead. Pressure had cracked its surface, leaving it like a rib that might snap at any moment, propping up a chest on the verge of collapse.
Black Owl squeezed through the passage, his black armor scraping against the rubble on either side with faint grinding sounds.
Beyond lay the deeper reaches of the mine.
The lighting crystals here had not yet been installed. It was not that no one had come here; they simply had not had time to install them. Disaster relief was still concentrated near the entrance. Clearing and repairing the deeper tunnels would have to wait a few more days.
Black Owl needed no light. The avatar's visual system saw more clearly in darkness than in daylight. He could see the mottled ancient marks beneath the mineral dust on the walls-not the chisel marks left by recent mining, but older, rougher traces.
Those marks were deep, so deep that even after countless years beneath mineral dust, their original outlines remained clear.
Black Owl slowed his steps.
He reached the end of the tunnel. It was a dead end blocked by rubble and earth, much like the mine entrance had been. But beneath the blocking rubble was a small gap, barely large enough for one person to crawl through.
The miners had not noticed this gap. Perhaps the rubble had concealed it, or perhaps they had noticed but paid it no mind-a blocked dead end was not worth their time.
Black Owl crouched, hooked the fingers of his black armor around a rock at the edge of the rubble, and gently moved it aside. Then came a second, and a third.
The rocks accumulated in a small pile at his feet, making soft, dull clattering sounds. The gap widened from fist-sized to head-sized, then from head-sized to shoulder-sized. Black Owl turned sideways and squeezed inside.
On the other side of the gap was a small space. It did not look naturally formed. It looked more as though something had been kept here for so long that the surrounding rock had remembered its shape.
The walls around the space bore faint dark marks, as though stained by some liquid. Black Owl stood there, his black faceplate facing those dark stains that had dried an unknown number of years ago, and remained silent for several breaths.
He was just about to take a step forward-the image vanished.
It did not slowly darken. The signal did not cut out. There was no gradual transition from clear to blurry. It was as though someone had pressed the power button: within a hundredth of a second, the image jumped from "normal" to "no signal," without any transition, any warning, or any sign beforehand.
Far away, beside the lake in the valley.
King Ghidorah lay on dry high ground, his three heads resting in turn on his foreclaws, his golden slit-pupiled eyes half closed. Sunlight fell warmly on his scales.
King Ghidorah's middle head yawned. Golden electricity flickered deep in his throat, then died away.
Then his eyes snapped open.
All three heads rose at once. His six golden slit-pupiled eyes went from half closed to fully open in an instant, their pupils contracting slightly, as though a bright light had suddenly stabbed through the darkness.
King Ghidorah's main body sensed it-not that he had sensed something, but that he had lost something. It was a subtle feeling, like counting money with your eyes shut and suddenly finding one coin missing. You could not tell which coin had vanished, but you knew the total was wrong.
Black Owl's sensory link had disconnected.
"What the hell?"
King Ghidorah froze for a moment. He reconnected, extending threads of psionic energy from his main body and tracing the invisible channel linking him to Black Owl.
The channel was still there. It had not been severed, interrupted, or subjected to any interference. But its endpoint-Black Owl-no longer existed.
King Ghidorah's middle head tilted, and his left head followed suit. His right head did not tilt, but its eyes shifted. All three heads made different little movements on the same body. This was King Ghidorah's special way of expressing that he was "utterly baffled."
"Where's my avatar? Why did it suddenly crash to a black screen?"
He tried to establish the connection again-not reconnect, but recreate it. He mobilized his psionic energy and wove a new link between his main body and Black Owl's last location.
Threads of psionic energy extended from his consciousness, passing through air, through rock, through the darkness deep inside the mine, probing toward the spot where he had just lost his senses.
There was nothing.
Where's my avatar?
King Ghidorah blinked all three pairs of eyes at once.
Then he uttered one word.
"Fuck."
It was not anger or fear. It was pure, unadulterated bewilderment from the depths of his soul.
What happened to that top-tier intelligent agent? The pinnacle of Sixth Era technology, combining the finest magic and mechanical technology of that age, supposedly "capable of concealment, detection, combat, and autonomous operation in any environment"-and after less than two days in my hands, it gives me a "black screen crash"?
Did that old bastard Apekus palm off a defective unit on me?
King Ghidorah cursed Apekus inwardly, then returned his attention to the problem at hand.
Black Owl had gone offline.
Two jets of scorching air blasted from King Ghidorah's nostrils, burning two charred pits into the grass before him. Golden electricity coursed over his scales like a swarm of snakes trapped in a cage, desperate to break free.
His heartbeat quickened-not from nerves, but from the mortifying anger of being played, of having something slap him in the face.
King Ghidorah stood up.
He did not rise slowly. He surged to his feet. All three heads lifted at once, his golden scales bursting with dazzling light beneath the sun. His foreclaws stamped a deep hollow into the ground, sending dirt and rubble flying in every direction.
His wings spread with a thunderous boom, nearly four hundred meters of golden wing membrane making a dull sound through the air, like a great drum being struck.
Bioelectric light suddenly erupted along his wing bones. Golden arcs leaped between the wing membranes, crackling in a string of sharp little reports.
The air was heating up.
Far faster and more violently than before. The instant King Ghidorah spread his wings, the temperature around him soared by an unknown number of degrees. The earth beneath his feet began to glow red. Dry grass spontaneously ignited, sending up wisps of smoke.
The distant lake-its surface began churning violently. Bubbles surged up from the lakebed, burst, and surged up again. Steam rose from the water, and rising hot air swept the white mist into the sky.
A black storm rapidly formed overhead. It did not gather slowly or build layer by layer. The instant King Ghidorah stood, an ink-black thundercloud burst into the sky, golden electricity roiling along its edges.
Centered above his heads, the clouds spread wildly outward, devouring every trace of blue and white in the sky and staining the entire heavens a thick, opaque black.
A storm spanning a dozen or so kilometers... I need to keep its range under control. Right, under control. Last time, I turned half the continent upside down. This time, I'm only checking on the mine. There's no need for that much commotion.
King Ghidorah compressed the hurricane into an area extending a dozen or so kilometers around his body. That distance was enough to conceal him without dealing a devastating blow to the ecosystems along his route.
Under his control, the storm wrapped tightly around his body like a fitted suit of armor, hiding his golden scales and all three raised heads within the black clouds.
Gales whipped up enormous waves on the lake. Turbid water surged toward the shore, battering the barren hills. Steam rose from the lake in billowing masses, like countless souls that had been steamed through and were now dissipating.
In the distance, several birds that had yet to fly away were swept into the sky by the currents. They beat their wings frantically at the storm's edge, like scraps of paper scattered by the wind.
King Ghidorah spread his wings and leaped into the air. The instant his enormous claws left the ground, a deep crater exploded beneath them. A streak of golden light pierced the clouds, with hurricanes and lightning close behind. He adjusted his course and flew toward the western mine.
Storm clouds churned around him, swallowing his figure completely.
From the ground, no one could see the silhouette of the three-headed golden dragon deep within the clouds-only a moving, roiling thundercloud flashing with golden electricity, like an enraged giant beast rampaging through the skies above the continent.
He was fast, far faster than when he had arrived. Carried along by him, the storm clouds moved toward Luoweida City at an almost frenzied speed...