#horizon

Riding past the base of the mountain that housed the Hive, I took a quick Focus scan to make sure rebels hadn't repopulated the compound. That seemed to be true, but a little further up the road, they had a surprise waiting for me. I spotted their rock traps set either side of the valley first, their lookouts second. Third, the trio of unsuspecting Oseram marching up toward their firing line. I pulled my Britleback to a hard stop, diving behind cover and setting off a smoke bomb to buy myself some time.

From the smoke, I took two of the rebels by surprise; by that time the others had already killed two of the three wandering Oseram.

The lone survivor joined me in fighting the rest, sticking to cover where we could and taking them down from a distance. I set off a blaze barrel near the last rebel, leaving them easy pickings in the patch of flames.

When the battle was through, the Oseram was in surprisingly high spirits, thanking me for me for saving his life and gifting me a few shards for the trouble.

Thankfully, my Bristleback managed to stay out of the line of fire, quietly churning up salvage during the scuffle. Mounting it once more, I rode west as the sun set, passing the fields of flowers around the Shining Wastes' Tallneck, still un-overridden.

Further still, over the rise and then down by the cairns and dry shrubs, and finally to the misty tropics of the Grove.

Entering the Maw of the Arena, I was recognised and well-regarded despite my outlander garb. I went straight to Dukkah, carrying a pouch worryingly-hefty with the weight of many dead soldiers' tags.

I returned them to her, collecting my guilty but much-anticipated reward. I once again eyed her Arena Medal wares eagerly, woefully out of pocket. Dukkah said that she and Kalla had been hoping I'd return soon. Right, I did say last time I was here that I'd fight upon my return. It's settled, then.

Apparently, Kalla had been stirring up the crowds—or 'boosting morale' as she would say—by telling them that Hekarro's Champion was soon to face her third battle in the Arena. She had something big planned and waiting for me in the Arena cages. Bigger than a Slitherfang? This should be good. Dukkah had armour of her own make to give me for the fight, courtesy of the Sky Clan. How could I refuse?

I stopped by the Arena stands to watch the place's equivalent to background noise. Whenever there were no challenges scheduled, they had a bunch of Champions out there fighting red-eye Watchers. For background noise, it was pretty damn loud.

I hung around the Arena for a couple hours after the fight, chatting to the locals and working on my gear. I also bought some new weapons, finally getting something with decent acid and fire output in a Wildfire hunter bow, a beautiful piece of Utaru make.

Secondly, I got myself a new and improved sharpshot bow. Surprisingly, the Arena merchant was selling a Quen bow—so the Lowland patrols had managed to take down some of their soldiers. It was an impressive weapon, and with some tinkering it would soon surpass my Warden sharpshot bow.

Before I had a chance to try them out, however, I got a call from Gaia through my Focus. Finally, some news. Beta had finished running her simulations of different methods for capturing Hephaestus. The prognosis wasn't looking good—but when did it, with Beta? Gaia said there was a way forward. That was all I needed to hear.

I downed tools and left the Arena in a rush, jumping on my Bristleback to return to base as soon as I could.

A familiar road past the usual landmarks, pushing my mount hard.

In the middle of the desert, I swapped out my Bristleback for a Charger for increased speed.

My gaze was draw by a brief distraction—a metal flower covering a Desert Tenakth shelter by the mountain pass watchtowers. I wonder how it managed to cover the structure, given the Wreaths were deployed back during the Faro Plague. Was it sitting there dormant, activated suddenly by accident? Regardless, good salvage was hiding within.

Through the mountain pass and past a pair of Apex Ravagers, which I raced by fast enough to escape their notice.

The blight clung heavy to the military ruins on the way up RCC mountain. Even with Demeter merged and at her command, Gaia had been unable to make much of a difference. I pushed on up the incline and into the cold.

Varl was there to greet me when I entered the Base. He said Beta had been telling him about her findings, or using him as a target to talk through her thought process out loud, as it sounded. Even to Varl's limited knowledge, the results didn't sound too promising. I'd leave the final word on that to Gaia.

As I went up to speak to Gaia, Varl headed downstairs to collect Beta. Incredibly, she was going to ascend and brief me personally. Meanwhile, Gaia explained that she and Beta had come up with a viable method to capture Hephaestus, and she was confident that her current processing density would be more than adequate to overpower it.

Then Beta entered to give her briefing, Varl beside her. It was strange to see her up and walking, but encouraging. Her posture, expression—the whole way she held herself—couldn't have been further from what I'd observed back at the Hades Proving Lab. Maybe she was finally starting to feel comfortable here.

Gaia began the explanation. Their plan to capture Hephaestus involved trapping it in a Cauldron core by installing Gaia on a second core, then erecting a local connection bridge between them to purge the subfunction's malicious code before merging its original version into Gaia. She had designed a sort of data capsule capable of storing her greatly-expanded codebase and being installed directly on-top of a standard Cauldron core. It was a whole lot bulkier that what I'd been carrying around; I'd need help shifting it. But that left a crucial question—where exactly would I be taking it? Cauldrons generally only had one core.

Beta reminded me: Gemini. The Cauldron at the Gate of the Vanquished, the Desert Tenakth site. Gaia brought up a projection of the layout at Cauldron Gemini. Seismic activity had torn a huge rupture through the Cauldron during construction, disrupting the connection of the first core, and further earthquakes impeded the construction of a second core on the other side. Eventually, the site was abandoned by Gaia's predecessor due to ongoing instability. All that had ceased now, but the Cauldron was never put into operations, despite being functionally complete.

According to Gaia, once she was installed on one of the cores, she would be able to simulate a functioning Cauldron by briefly connecting it to the wider network, which Hephaestus would no doubt flock to as a facility it had yet to infect. She would then establish a local connection to Hephaestus from the other core and shut down the Cauldron's connection to the wider network, effectively trapping it. It would then be a manual job of removing Hephaestus' Zenith malware, given its high relative complexity to the others. Beta had built a program to do just that, minimizing human oversight. Should make it easy enough even for me.

All that seemed fairly straight-forward, but Beta was quick to jump in and undermine Gaia's plan. She said it would never work. The power surge created during the merge, and by re-connecting Gemini to the Cauldron network, would be enormous, and easily detected even by rudimentary technology. The Zeniths would pinpoint Gaia's signal immediately, and she would be unable to use Minerva to mask the nature of the activity as she did here at Base.

Gaia conceded that this was true. It wouldn't take the Zeniths long to reach us from the coast either, with an army of Specters and their own hyper-advanced weaponry in tow, wearing unbreakable shields. The merge would take a few hours at least. We wouldn't be able to keep it going that long.

There was a way through this, I knew it—even if Beta wasn't willing to consider one.

If we got Erend, Zo, and Kotallo to ride to other Cauldrons in the region and set off signal pulses of similar strength, spoofing its contents, we could trick the Zeniths. They'd have to check each site...and we'd just have to hope they didn't split up or check Cauldron Gemini first. After Verbena's death, they were likely to be more wary, though we still didn't know how many Zeniths there were. The plan would put the others in danger, unless we found some way to trigger the pulses remotely, but if there was no way to hide what we were doing, we had to try.

The rebels had erected scaffolding around the Horus to reach its core machinery, likely harvesting it for further parts used in their override rig. Gliding down from the scaffolding, there were still no rebels in sight. Looks like I might have actually driven them out of the region, at least for a while. The Oseram at Hidden Ember should be safe for the time being.

Returning to my patient Bristleback, I rode back to Hidden Ember.

Arriving by late morning, I stopped by the herbalist/brewer for a little liquid strength, a morning meal. Feeling drained by my night of infiltration.

I spoke to Abadund, trading some of the valuable trinkets and salvage I'd procured from the rebels. He thanked me for saving Morlund from a sure fate in the history books of failed Oseram flight attempts. He was exasperated at Morlund's persistence despite the setback. I doubt Morlund will be getting him to ride the Mark II any time soon.

At the workbench, I replenished my ammo supplies and worked on my weapons.

Walked up top and watched the city lights for a short while, trying to wind my brain down, relax. The local Oseram were keen to hear of my exploits as well, some eager to go south and pillage the Horus now that the rebels were gone. I urged them to hold off. That place wouldn't stay empty forever.

I said a quick goodbye to Morlund and Stemmer, in case they weren't around later when I left.

I retired once again to my tent, stretching out on the bedroll to catch up on lost sleep.

I only slept for a couple hours, then was up again and straight on my Bristleback. Restless; craving a real fight. And I needed to get all these soldiers' tags back to Dukkah anyway. The Arena it was.

Riding past the northernmost rebel outpost in the Stillsands, I spotted a lone rebel who looked to be collecting supplies from the abandoned site. The Ravager remained docile toward him, the override module embedded beneath its armour no doubt still intact. I shot the rebel down from a distance, then carried on.

Heading for Camp Nowhere on my way north-west to the Arena, I passed the Tallneck I'd once repaired.

A fierce storm swept in as I reached the camp. I dismounted, taking some modicum of shelter in the dust bowl. As I did I overheard a pair of Oseram arguing about a missing girl.

The woman was named Minda, and according to her, a girl had come to Camp Nowhere recently with a bunch of heavy equipment, spouting off about sounds and wires and Old World tech. She'd wanted to set up some sort of tower here, even convinced Porguf it'd rake in the shards, which was enough for him to play along and see what she was planning. The man who'd been arguing with Minda kept going on about how crazy the girl had been, how 'maladjusted'. So, Silga had tried to share her discovery with the other Oseram in the region. It sounded like she hadn't received the warmest of welcomes.

The man really rubbed me the wrong way, especially since it sounded like he'd been hounding Silga ever since she arrived, finally causing her to pack up her rig and leave when he kept messing with her equipment. Minda was worried about Silga, out there alone in Tenakth country, but I assured her that Silga could handle herself. She'd probably just returned to her camp by the radio tower, private as it was. Free of unwelcome interference. I hope she won't give up on her dream; if she trekked all the way down to Hidden Ember, I know Morlund would be exhilarated by her discovery, though his eagerness would likely put Silga off. I bet she'd get on well with Delah, though, maybe even Boomer.