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TFC Chapter 74: Past
🕑 Added 2022-07-25 00:44:27 +0000 UTC“You’ll regret it…” Using a cliche movie villain sentence, the man that successfully kept his mask on even after such an intense exchange ended up surrendering, it could be heard in his voice.
“A lot of people will regret my coming to this era, that’s for certain,” still on-edge for the rational reason that his energy pool was nearly emptied and that his lower body had been crushed not even a minute ago, Aven answered coldly.
Then, the faraway sound of civilization reached him, a clear sign that the seal area had been lifted, and that was accompanied by more than just some commotion sounds as Elandia wasn’t the capital of the strongest nation of Green for nothing.
Keeping his whole attention and unblinking eyes on the negotiator, lots of emotions flowed through his mind, and he couldn’t help sharing some of them, “Thank you for confirming the Bright Canopy really shouldn’t exist anymore.”
“Shut up…” The abundantly bleeding man whispered, putting on an act as a weakened and dying man.
“You still have so much energy, I’m sure if your legs were still usable limbs, you would have either continued attacking me with just as much temper as before or fled without much difficulty,” Aven theorized, he was able to see how bright the man still was with his energy threads surrounding him, ready to act at any moment.
“Shut up, please,” the weak act vanished instantly, replaced by a clear voice telling him to stop talking, politely.
“Ha~ I guess you’re not in the mood to talk,” Aven reasoned, nodding to himself, “Well, I also need to go back to work, and I’ll also have to refurbish the whole design area, so just don’t move and I’ll shut up soon enough.”
Keeping dozens of energy threads and his 4 handguns pointed at the man, people wearing colorful clothes soon arrived at the scene.
“Fairy Amias,” one of the newly arrived bowed slightly, ignoring the man profusely bleeding on the floor, “It was an oversight on our part, we hadn’t expected so many means to have been employed.”
“Tell me more later,” still not moving his eyes from the man who similarly held the stare battle, he answered half-casually, the sharpness from battle slowly dissipating but still there, “I have work to resume for now.”
Bowing one more time slightly as the ancient etiquette for interacting with fairies the Eland Royal Agency had taught each and every one of its members to do, a few colorful people who registered as intense grade 4-level energy figures to Aven’s sensitive energy came to secure the paralyzed grade 4 martial super.
Breaking eye contact first, Aven adopted an utterly pragmatic mindset and began retracing the path he had taken throughout the chase.
Every time he found a broken polymerized concrete slate, he ripped it whole off the ground with his telekinesis and moved on.
‘The earlier all the traces are erased, the better.’
After going through his entire escape path and seeing a few more colorful people taking care of the entirety of the Canopy “negotiation team”, he passed by the production area where he dumped all his broken concrete slates and ended up back at the design area, where someone was waiting for him. Someone he knew.
Looking seriously at him in the same way he always had when they weren’t discussing something funny, the brown-haired, black-eyed, and tanned brown-skinned Alain spoke first, “I hadn’t expected anything less from you.”
“It’s nothing?” Aven hesitatingly answered, not knowing how to describe his current mental state, “It’s something that should have happened when I was only a relatively powerless grade 2. That it happened to me now of all times… It was utterly stupid of them.”
“The Canopy never acts based on how others perceive its decision, and that is even more true now that hundreds of its branches have gone rogue and acquired their independence,” Alain fed him something he already knew.
“No need to elaborate. In the end, there were more positive than negative. It not only took the weight of worry and expectation off me, but it also confirmed my plans regarding this dark and disgusting side of our reality. The Canopy was never something I planned on sparing anyway,” smiling slightly, he passed past Alain to observe for himself the damage.
“What a big month…” Letting him pass through the broken door without blocking him, he even accompanied him inside.
“Sigh~” Seeing the resulting devastation, Aven could only sigh before he started abusing his energy telekinesis to throw all the broken display screens, the fragmented wooden and glass desks, and the mangled wires and computer gears out into the corridor.
“I’m really a genius to have split all the important facilities into different areas, all clearly isolated from each other…” Praising his foresight for this supreme master result of only having to replace inexpensive and common furniture, he slowly recovered his average enthusiasm.
“Do you want to take a break before continuing working? Alcohol maybe? To erase the hidden residual stress?” Alain unnaturally proposed seeing the too-quick adaptation.
“You think I want to drown my happiness in alcohol?” Confused as to where Alain had even gotten the idea that he wanted to take a break or drink intoxicating substances, he tilted his head and looked at him weirdly, eyes unblinking, “And energy lives need special substances to be rendered high or spiritually unstable, not that I’ll ever use any of them, my time is too precious to waste on things like that.”
“Sigh…” It was Alain’s turn to sigh, but for a much different reason, “How can you shrug what happened so easily? You need to let it out at some point.”
Looking at him with a bit more understanding, Aven's smile widened as the wits that had allowed him to escape a whole Canopy team still worked perfectly fine, “Well, I need to restart the IUM and clean up a bit, but after that…”
“Why not? It seems that you have things on your heart, why not share some of it with the younger generation who’s in distress after demolishing an entire team of grade 3 and 4 supers by himself? I dare say I’m surely the greatest psychological counselor of Green!” He enthusiastically said.
…
“Humans are capable of the worst,” Alain stated around a glass of expensive martial-produced whiskey Aven had served him professionally, “All the more the Bright Canopy literally ruling over the entire underworld. Believing in their despicable lies and fake contracts is the worst mistake one can ever make in their life.”
“Interesting… That’s a very opinionated talk you’re making there, not that I disagree~” Observing the different drinks he had available, Aven, still in his small fairy form, decided on a cocktail to make for himself, “Is there any correlation between that and you having adjusted your life career from assault to production tech super?”
“I… Wish not,” agreeing without saying it directly, the more than a hundred years old man seemed to deflate at his past life being brought up, still not feeling like he wanted to talk about it to someone so much younger than him.
“Why not start from a time and place I can’t even imagine?” The fairy manning the bar of the untouched resting area suggested, “When did you awaken? How was life for a tech super before the advent of the new age?”
“31 years old,” maybe feeling like he had to answer to fill his… Boss? Friend? Colleague? Endless curiosity, or maybe feeling like talking after drinking so much, he opened up slightly, “In the middle of working in the middle of a potato field.”
“Pff~” A weird sound escaped Aven’s mouth as he heard the answer to his question before he instantly assumed back the most serious and confident barman face and position he could the moment Alain looked up, “Yeah, I can totally relate…”
“Can you? Anyway, the place this field was once located has long since been buried under meters of concrete and asphalt, so it doesn’t matter, it’s only a part of my memory…” He developed his circumstances before slowly starting to answer the second question.
“At that time, integrated production lines weren’t even a concept. I doubt even a single tech super took a step forward in researching them, so even when I reached grade 3, I never entertained the idea that there was a difference between the assault and production tech super paths,” he skipped a big piece until he arrived at his grade 3 transition.
“Back then, when after a whole century the royal family had remained so low in terms of number, no one thought the fairies would ever come back from the endless spiral they had entered into, their extinction was the most publicly untold secret…”
Recounting a story from a time Aven would never experience and that his knowledge gave him no power over, Alain slowly captivated the young fairy listening to his every word as it created different cocktails to sate his sudden needs for drinks.
“The weapons I used, if they could even be called weapons, were shields, pseudo-shields, huge and thick slates of alloy I personally refined and tempered using my own hands with some help from other supers I was friends with at that time…”
“My reputation had started growing at that time following a deployment at the northern side of Eland, to fight an insurgency that was most probably caused by the Bright Canopy seeking to test the might of the recently born fairies for the umpteenth times…”
“Bathing in glory and honor, I got access to the most recent research Eland has started to make the tech energy system not as useless as it was back then…”
“Here~” Smoothly interrupting his story at some point, he handed him a few glasses all containing different drinks, “Take care of your throat and vocal cords, you’re still a biological life form until the day I awaken you as a fairy~”
“Thanks…” Heading his advice, Alain sipped slowly at a bright green drink that radiated a feeling of freshness and, strangely… Faith. Or devotion.
“Coming into contact with the most recent discoveries allowed the me from that time to realize how unlimited the potential of the tech super path was, so I started investing myself…”
Telling the story of a man who discovered a part of himself he had kept ignoring from his awakening, Alain reminisced about his burning passion for alloy formulas and the research for the ultimate metal.
But one day, it all came crumbling apart as yet another insurgency began in the same time period the 4th human era abomination surge happened.
Being called to the front, Alain couldn’t refuse the call of duty and put back his mantle of being a prominent grade 3 tech super.
It was clear from the story that his circumstances from back then strangely echoed Aven’s current ones, he wasn’t just any grade 3, he was a grade 3 super with capabilities surpassing his grade.
No abominations could break his weapons or reach him, he was unstoppable amidst the grade 3 battlefield he belonged to.
Once the abomination surge was over, however, he didn’t have any time to return to his newly acquired passion for material research and the understanding of metals under all its form as Eland had nearly allowed the insurgency to create its own state.
The return of not only the soldiers but also the fairies who had battled with their life on the line destroyed this insurgency to pieces the moment the Canopy realized its experiment had gone wrong and removed its shadow support.
And, as if all the pieces came together at the time, Alain attained grade 4 after decades spent as a grade 3 super.
“I asked myself, again and again… Should I deepen my path? But this indecision couldn’t hold a candle to my alight fascination for the technological revolution that was arriving,” he silently exposed his emotion from that time.
“Hence, my decision was to take the supreme energy specialization related to my fascination, the production strengthening energy specialization. My first specialization, which had been renamed atomic bond strengthening around that period, was relegated to the background…”
“Production strengthening…” Aven mused over those words as Alain thought about what happened from that moment, “Maximizing the amount of tech-enhancement produced by one’s enhancement of a production tool or machine… Really the most drastic turn you could have ever decided on.”
“It sure was,” he kept his serious look as he said that, “And then… Star Trail was created, and the path I chose became part of a new classification that divided the tech super community into 2 camps, one at the origin of a whole new philosophical and industrial revolution, the other at the complete moral mercy of this new camp.”
“Production tech super forever!” A certain fairy posed and pointed at the sky when he said that.
“Shortly after, accompanied by massive upheavals like the discovery of the tech-turbine phenomenon allowing for a nearly endless production of electricity as long as a tech super was willing to provide his energy and the arrival of a new generation of people like Commander and Rival, who entered the grade 3 stage scene with a-”
“Production tech super forever ever!” A certain fairy cut him off this time as it felt its mentors were much cooler all of a sudden.
“I guess so…” Alain grabbed another glass, this one filled with a white liquid that smelled of the sea, and sipped a bit of it, raising a brow at the peculiar taste and smell that filled his mouth and nose.
“Ho?” At that moment, Aven’s phone alerted its owner that something had arrived, so he naturally fetched it, opened it up…
[Rainbow IRC/Aven Amias Assault Preliminary Report:
Abnormal activities started in the middle of the night of the assault out of nowhere, no perimeter intrusions, no cyber attacks, and no special Canopy branch movements were reported.
At the center of the Rainbow Industrial And Research Center, an isolating sphere-type innate ability had manifested. Such an innate ability is only known to be owned by a sub-leader of the Bio-Frost rogue Canopy branch, Adonias.
The assault was organized in such a professional and swift way that only when Aven Amias’s tech-infusion of the entire facility stopped did the security notice the abnormality, included are his present, at that time, colleagues working directly inside the building or near it.
By the time the source of the perimeter breach was found with sphere breach operations having already been attempted dozens of times, 6 unconscious people and 1 dead personnel were located…]
“Ho~” Reading through the entire report without feeling like it had anything to do with him, he quickly finished it and passed the phone over to Alain, “I’m sure you’re curious, not even old age can erase such a natural human nature that is curiosity!”
“Mmh,” grunting as he accepted the phone, he started reading the report silently.
A few minutes passed without anyone talking in the bar corner of the resting area, it had to be said though that with only 2 people, if one was occupied, the other obviously encountered a problem to start a discussion.
“They really didn’t have any good intentions from the start, what did I expect?” Alain concluded heavily, “Now that they failed, other branches will take notice of you… From the start, this negotiation had no good end.”
“It depends on the point of view~” Aven corrected him, “I have so many violent and bloody footage now, so I’m feeling inspired to create a sub-series where I’ll publicly release all the gory things I went through. Yet more self-confirmation that I’m not anyone!”
“Maybe bring in your strategic knowledge?” A light of interest flashed in the only bar customer’s eyes, “I would certainly want to see a complete reconstruction of what happened, then you can give your opinion on everything that went wrong, why they were like this, how the Canopy team acted…”
“Hehe~ Let me catch your inspiration~” Opening his slightly damaged electronics box that had survived the shockwave, Aven brought out his laptop and booted it up within a minute before starting to add all the ideas.
In the end, the next hour turned into a surprise brainstorming session for a new video series project which had the potential to grow to become something a certain fairy certainly wanted to see.
When the opportunity arose, the two eventually split, each returning to their own occupations. One went to oversee the perfect restoration of all the properties and goods destroyed by the recent events, the other went to visit the assembly hall.
“I should be done in just a few hours…” Arriving at the assembly hall, Aven was welcomed by the exact IUM parts repartition plan he had prepared, all neatly placed next to each other, only waiting to be assembled.
Approaching the lifeless gathering of parts, all at least tens of times bigger than him, he landed in the middle and certified that this 2nd iteration of the IUM would be much more aligned with what he had in mind when he started this project.
“It still needs another iteration to remove all the remaining weaknesses… But it’s already looking so much better~” He softly said.
Bending down to physically touch the output-input area of an integrated cable that had been directly soldered inside the alloy casing of the unit he was standing on, he felt only relief at the absence of leeway or obvious flaws everywhere he was looking.
Everywhere around him, only mechanical perfection and tech-production optimization were present.
“Hu…” Deep breathing one time, he spread his telekinesis threads and turned on the assembly hall main computer.
A few minutes later, accompanied by music starting playing in the entire hall, a gigantic blueprint was projected on a convenient completely white wall.
The moment he saw this blueprint, Aven took to the air with a soft flutter from his mesmerizing energy wings, the entire previously lifeless gathering of parts coming to life as he ascended.
Following those parts, gigantic suspension cables were forcefully drawn from the ceiling and a huge blow torch joined Aven’s side.
It was time for some optimized assembly.
