Factory Reset: Divine Corruption

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Chapter Eighty-Nine: Toil and Trouble

A scientist's purpose is to explore, to look into, and to catalog. It is the job to look into the universe, and find where the universe looks into them. A simple definition for such a broad category of existence, of a drive. And Ruinate fit that broad, vague description in every fathomably way.

And when Ruinate started to feel the pulse of energy, he started a hard sprint. His mind was dead focused. The pull was so foreign to him, but with his extensive research into Boson Energy, and his knowledge drawn from all aspects of The Federation's databases, he knew what it was. New Boson Energy.

The pull was coming from the Boson dormant or active in their veins. Like White and Black, and Green to some extent, Orange-Boson Energy had special properties. It seemed to not manifest in organic beings, but instead manifested in the very terrain itself. Uncontrollable, a force of nature buried in the bedrock.

But what had generated it? Ruinate's claws collapsed together as his tail swayed behind him, the protogen drawing his sword as his visor scanned all materials around him for any radiation. The beacon was the obvious answer, but Ruinate doubted it was the right answer. It couldn't be, these things were always far more complex.

The serenade had grown louder and louder, more and more less muffled. While a few minutes back it felt relaxing, beautiful even, now it was like a cacophony of different noises and vibrations. Ruinate knew a beacon was there, he just knew it in his blood, in his very core.

Ruinate's power was deadly. Explosions were one thing, the ability to spin was another, but Ruinate's was straightforward. Anything he touched and willed to be, disintegrated, barely even reduced to touch. The molecules themselves seemed to decay, the very atoms, the particles, the quarks. All gone.

And yet, Ruinate was a scientist. He never was a fighter, despite having designed his own weapon. A sword that integrated his power into itself. A serrated blade, self-sharpening. It was A.I.-Integrated and could speak in a monotone voice, but it never did. The artificial intelligence that lay in the sword had turned itself off a year prior.

Ruinate kept running, letting his power flow through his body. He had tweaked himself somewhat. There was a specific material that he could not disintegrate. The alloy that Ruinate himself created, and existed nowhere else in the universe: Runtrate Noridide.

Ruinate was proud of his work, to say the least. He pressed the tip of his sword against the ground as he ran, the sharpness smoothly slicing through the hard rock as if it were loose soil. Small trails of decay swept across it, though the arcs only went briefly outward from the slicing before they stopped.

Ruinate's ears twitched as he continued down his path, feeling the air itself become thicker as the cacophony grew louder and louder. He could feel the difference, the mixture of Orange and Black Boson Energy around him. The Residents, or some form of Pattern-Screamer, was there with him. That wasn't good.

Ruinate shook his head. He was there to grab the beacon and run back. Mason and the team were behind him, they should be catching up soon. It had gone decently smooth thus far, and he intended to make it out of there alive. He needed to, in fact. The only other tech savvy person alive currently was Renaissance, but he was of little use in the science department.

Rip-Cord was better at it than Renaissance is, but they no longer had the blessing of having Rip-Cord around.

Ruinate felt himself come so close to the source of the sounds of the beacon. There was a corner coming up ahead, brimming with light that flooded the darkness of the cave that Ruinate had been running through. His fur was dusty, his paws calloused and his visor's expression offline. While his duty was to be a scientist, being an explorer was never that bad of a profession.