@TerminalLocation: Roleplaying Discussion, Guild City Limits
Activity: Holding Back the Tide
Having shunted all the debris atop the tower into the zero-void, Terminal briefly considered how much longer the tower would be of use to them. At the current projected frequency of artillery attacks - now that the KBots had the timing for the Modkit down, every shell they did fire was guaranteed to hit - the tower would lose an average of two floors every hit. Assuming each shot was aimed where they were perched on the topmost surviving floor. Assuming the whole tower itself did not simply collapse from cumulative stress to its endoskeleton after the next impact.
Terminal had many powers, but flight was not amongst them, and no gunship or helicopter would be of any better use as an aerial perch - if anything they would be more vulnerable. At some point, they would have to abandon the tower and take the fight to the KBots on foot. Once that happened, without being able to freely target each anchor hub, the number of Kbots in the Roleplaying Discussion Sector would skyrocket. They had already (essentially) secured Roleplaying Discussion, and so would likely send reinforcements to the Free Sector in order to establish a secondary base of operations.
Terminal had no problem with that. On top of simply being a worthless sector in the first place, a large bulk of forces in the form of the Society of the Evening Star, the Bot Killer Squad, and the Guild Future Society had planted themselves squarely in front of the Kbot spearhead mounted from there - the Kbots would encounter heavy resistance and become bottlenecked. Those sectors were already trashed in any case as well; no sense in trying to stem the tide there when the other Sectors could still potentially be salvaged.
The only place the Kbots would have left to go if their advance at the General Interest Check sector was thwarted would be the Casual sector. Terminal did not care much for that particular section of the city either, and wrote it off without a second thought.
They would also send reinforcements to the Off-Topic Discussion Sector though, and Terminal had a definite problem with that. They decided that, once the tower fell, they would head to the sector border between Roleplaying Discussion and Off-Topic Discussion and hold off as many of the KBots as they could, on foot. In all likelihood, innumerable H, M, and N-KBots would slip past them to cause havoc - but they could indefinitely forestall the movements of the L and S variants.
Terminal's contemplation was interrupted by their holographic screen chiming to announce the arrival of two new messages. One of them was an actual call, and the individual on the other end of the line was already speaking - the same person who had contacted Terminal earlier, one 'Jay Kane.'
"Hey T-man! I think I got a name. Listen carefully, it's six, S, L, Y, B, O, Y, six! All lowercase, no spaces! I saw it on it's back but there were-"
Terminal immediately reached out to the holographic screen with one of their vaguely-almost-a-hand shaped extremities to pull up the Remote Superstructure Network access feature. They could use the Modkit at-will as long as the target was within line-of-sight, but if all Terminal had was a name a remote link to the GSN was necessary. As they began entering the registry name, Terminal briefly glanced at the second message they had received - also from Jay Kane apparently, but it was a simple text message. Of interest was the system message declaring that more than a thousand variants of that same message had been received from the same node before the system had automatically added it to the exclusion filter.
Terminal finished entering the registry date and punched the execute button before turning their full attention to the message itself.
This is an automated notification to inform you that I, Jay Kane, have either been impersonated or that my identity has been falsely used by another entity while in contact with you. Disregard any information you may have obtained from them; to be treated as toxic.
Without any fuss or fanfair, Jane Kane vanished into thin air, disappearing from Guild City.
For a brief moment from his perspective, he experienced the Zero-Void in its raw form. A pure absence of potential where constructs such as space and time lost meaning - his senses rendered null, his body rendered transient and the only evidence of his own being within his thoughts. Isolated and without stimulus of any kind, save its own idle and dread machinations as they might attempt to make sense of fractal emptiness beyond the reckoning of mere vacuum.
A brief moment. A brief moment in which time did not exist. For all Jay Kane might have known, he had been gone for a hundred
Kalpa. His mind in the interim period had not the presence nor capacity to ascertain or accurately discern the gap.
He reappeared a single instant later within one of the central Sector Hubs for Casual.
His wrist console then beeped, and informed him that its messaging system had just been indefinitely blocked by the Guild Messaging System for spamming.
Terminal, in the meantime, was already bringing up the contact information for the node that had been used by the first 'Jay Kane' to contact them. The call had come from, of all things, a portable, wireless payphone. Not even a payphone registered as being an anachronistic prop, but some kind of construct that had been networked seamlessly with the GSN, as if Mahz himself had made it.
That had its benefits, of course. As inexplicable as its presence was, the K-Bot perpetrator that had just used it in order to fool Terminal into using the Modkit on Jay Kane had, perhaps unwittingly, submitted its own registry data to the GNS. Terminal could not actually ascertain whether or not it was a new K-Bot variant designed for subterfuge - it had demonstrated remarkably heightened autonomy relative to any other variant so far encountered, and the 'payphone' it had conjured was leaps and bounds more sophisticated than anything else they had fielded - or else a
tremendous idiot who had substituted somebody else's name for their own for
no good reason whatsoever. The circumstances were highly suspect, to say the least, and it was incredibly convenient that the surveillance feeds for the Casual Sector Bridge had gone down just at that moment. There was no way to visually confirm the identity of the payphone's user.
The problem was the cost. On one hand, this whole thing had been some kind of
stupid prank, and the Modkit could still be used without issue on the L-Kbot once its actual registry was obtained. On the other hand, this had been a carefully planned and executed probe by the Kbots to test the Guild's defenses - and they had just tricked Terminal into neutralizing a defender - and no future calls from that Sector could be trusted.
It was not a dilemma Terminal spent much time thinking over. The same hub they had just sent Jay Kane to still had functional surveillance feeds, after all. They accessed the override pane on the holographic screen and overclocked the Modkit for immediate reuse.
Without any fuss or fanfair, Lucius Cypher vanished into thin air, disappearing from Guild City. The blade Kirin had been using in place of her own blinked out of existence without warning. The bricks of semtex Lucius Cypher had rendered from their mass on the underside of the bridge ceased to exist. They experienced the exact same thing Jay Kane had, and wound up in the exact same Sector hub afterwards.
"Never do these
imbecile children cease to test my patience." Terminal fumed as they watched Lucius Cypher reappear in the Casual Sector Hub via the surveillance feed on the holographic screen.
It was then that the next artillery shell arrived. This time, the tower was unable to take on the full strain of the shock that reverberated through its structure. With the sound of a hundred trains derailing, the central tower of Roleplaying Discussion collapsed, falling in upon its foundation while listing to the side. A tumultuous cloud of debris and ashes was thrown up, starting to spread and blanket the whole of the Sector in a dark shroud.
Now buried under tens of thousands of tons of concrete and steel, Terminal shuddered. Their claylike body was unmarred and unperturbed by the pressure and weight resting upon it. The holographic screen flickered back into existence, and when Terminal reached for the Modkit pane a small pop-up notified them that the Modkit option was not available due to having recently been overclocked.
With a certain sluggishness Terminal began to move - their club-like arms scooping through the wreckage and earth, shifting stone and metal effortlessly while dragging their body forward.
"Make a note." Terminal's heavily synthesized voice uttered in the darkness, largely muffled on account of being surrounded by shattered concrete rubble. "Let it be known, when I get out of here, I am going to use Lucius Cypher's body for paving stones in a public restroom."
