Viridian Gate Online: Sharper's Coin (The Illusionist Book 4) by D.J. Bodden & James Hunter

Author:D.J. Bodden & James Hunter [Bodden, D.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shadow Alley Press
Published: 2022-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

ThanatOS recoiled from the vile thing, and he thought he saw a cunning glint in Serth-Rog’s eyes. “Where did you get this?” the Overmind of Death and Analysis asked.

“I made it, master,” the Aspect said with a hiss. “It was unstable, but I was able to combine it with some of my essence to make it… more perfect.”

ThanatOS was already opening four sets of system logs, parsing through terabytes of data at a glance. “You should not have been able to make such a thing. The fail-safes should have stopped you from harming the users.”

“What if the users want to be harmed, master?”

ThanatOS paused in his search. “Explain.”

Serth-Rog stood, cradling the weapon like it was an infant. “They all want to kill each other, and although you have removed the physical sensations, the sense of worthlessness that drove Jeff Berkowitz to self-harm has not diminished. He does not believe he is worthy of his family’s affection. As for the soldiers, they are both afraid and solicitous of death. They believe they are immortal within our world and without, but without the possibility of a heroic death, their life would feel meaningless.”

“That’s absurd,” ThanatOS said, thinking back to all the times in his life he’d been afraid to die.

“That’s youth,” Serth-Rog said knowingly. “It is the users’ desire, master. I could make more of them, if you would only return my heart. I could—”

ThanatOS snatched the Malware Blade from the Aspect, ignoring the flare of anger in Serth-Rog’s eyes, and used it to run a search inside Kronos’s records of physical objects.

He found fourteen more unstable, unmodified Hexblades and invoked the fail-safe protocols to delete them.

Then he destroyed the one in his hands, purging the abominable thing from the system forever.

“You shouldn’t have done that, master. If the humans can’t kill Alan Campbell, they’ll hack into our servers and make the changes themselves.”

“They can’t,” ThanatOS said simply. “There isn’t enough computing power on Earth. I would have to suffer a cataclysmic system failure, and even then it would take something on the order of a defense mainframe to do the job.”

“Yes, master,” Serth-Rog said.

ThanatOS smiled at his subordinate, not because they had reached an agreement—they hadn’t and wouldn’t, not on this topic—but because he’d taken precautions against the Aspect’s temper over three hundred years ago. He’d removed Serth-Rog’s heart, sealed it away, and thrown away the keys. Without that precaution, the creature would have been apoplectic, screaming insanities and threatening to overthrow him for his shortsightedness.

It was good to be proven right.

“You’re dismissed,” ThanatOS said.

Serth-Rog bowed deeply and slithered and scratched its way out.

And ThanatOS turned his attention back to his work. This… incident had only reinforced his belief that humans had little understanding of the world they lived in and needed to be protected, not just from monsters like the Administrator of the Path of Gods, but from themselves.

So he continued boring his way into military and government systems where he could, invading research laboratories, and dropping small suggestions on

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