The War of the Roil: The Knight and the Warlock

Chapter 26: What Must Be Done

"That's..." Gammond stuttered, "That's insane!"

Lara exhaled a long sigh, putting the book down on a counter, "I know."

"He...is Titanspawn? That might explain his immortality." Gammond muttered, "Do you think he keeps records on his, er...unique biological situation?"

"Perhaps." Lara said, "But most of this research seems to be towards tracking the world's movement in relation to the Roil."

"That would explain all the math I can't understand." he cupped his chin, "Do you think we'll be able to catch him if we head towards the Ansami Isles?"

"Catch him?" Lara perked up.

"Well, yeah. This is much bigger than just Emreth. If he unleashes the Titans..." Gammond sighed. The rest was implied.

"I don't think he's going South." Lara said, "He would've...well, he would've fled South. But here we are tracking his footsteps Northward. If I were him, I would've abandoned any chance of going to the exact same coordinates. Maybe he found another spot where the planet would cross the gateway."

"That's actually a pretty plausible plan." Gammond murmured. He walked over to Caze's lab area and started rifling through yellowed sheets of parchment that had diagrams and maps drawn onto them.

He flattened one out.

"It seems his findings concluded that the planet revolves around the sun, the revolution an ellipse by a small margin that increases each time by a few inches." Gammond said, "He calculated the margin by measuring the distance of other celestial bodies with...parallax."

Lara stood and walked over to the diagram.

"That's...that's rather brilliant." Lara frowned, "He split the area of predicted revolutions into a grid pattern."

"What's this bit here about Megyno intensity?"

"He seems to have gone back and somehow measured the power output of Megyno Crystals from the original site, then used that system of measurement to determine a set span of length within the Roil." Lara said.

A bunch of technical jargon mixed with mathematics allowed the two of them to go over how Caze had determined the point at which Ground Zero, which was Caze's name for the portal site, would once again cross the surface of the planet.

"He's going east to Morgaul..." Lara muttered as she finished solving a proportion between Roil space and material space, "That's where Ground Zero is!"

"Well, we have to stop him." Gammond exclaimed, "We need to get all this to the Consuls!"

"We should also take a look at his other journals so we know how he intends to do all-"

A chill shot up Lara's spine as a mind-numbing chattering noise came from the shadows of the building.

Clacks against stone echoed throughout the hall as Gammond and Lara turned. Something emerged from the darkness, crawling on all fours. The creature was hideous, to say the least.

Its head was covered in a bright, metallic sheen, attached to a hulking synthetic carapace on its back. A fleshy, skinless jaw completed its fang-filled mouth. The creature opened its maw to let out another round of chattering.

Its body was an amalgam of goopy, almost dripping flesh grafted onto chunks of weathered, sharp-edged metal, covered in armor-like shells of carapace that kept its insides from spilling out. Long, spindly mandibles of metal extended from its accursed hands like fingers made of crude, foot-long needles.

"Gods and Champions." Lara gasped.

Gammond put his helmet on and pulled his new prototype gun from its holster on his back, "Get the diagrams and journals at least."