O.C. Saar
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Omega Release | Chapter 27: Killer Butterflies. Of course.
🕑 Added 2025-06-25 18:00:04 +0000 UTCThe airlock doors opened with a hiss, and Reina and I entered the Environmental Control Facility. Or, at least, I assumed it was since our view was blocked by a forest of long blades of flexiglass three meters high, filled with liquids of innumerable shades of green. A gentle breeze went through the facility, and the blades bent away from it, the liquid producing bubbles with each movement.
It felt like we were tiny bugs in the lawn of one of the rich folks down on the Middle Ring. It was beautiful, if a little terrifying.
“First time in an ECF?” Reina said, watching my astonished face with amusement.
“Kind of,” I said, “I’ve been to others before, but they were mostly industrial machinery.”
“Yeah,” Reina said with a shrug, “Because of the environmental conditions of the Scorched Plains, we had to go for the second-best thing to organics. Turns out making a volcano livable is quite a lot of work. Who knew?”
I chuckled and shook my head. “Alright, so, can I get the sitrep now?”
Reina started to nod, but she saw something in the air behind me. Her eyes widened, and she reached into a pocket, pulling out a small canister and two rebreathers, handing me one. “Here, put this on, quick, and don’t speak or make any sudden movements,” she said in a rush, clamping the rebreather to her face. I hurried to do the same, and as soon as the rebreather let out the hiss of it sealing around my mouth and nose, she clicked the button on the canister.
A cloud of green mist surrounded us, and I looked up as a shadow fell on us. I looked up and was astonished at the sight.
A swarm of multi-colored butterflies lazily flew past us. Their wings were of all shapes, sizes, colors, and textures. It created a mesmerizing sight as if a cloud of jewels was floating past.
I looked down at Reina and pointed up, raising an eyebrow. What was she so afraid of? She slowly shook her head at me. I looked back at the butterfly swarm and used [Examine].
[Clean-All Butterfly]
Level: 27
A creature created to consume. An active [Clean-all Butterfly] swarm will identify and consume all organic and non-organic materials that do not belong in its territory, ensuring the uninterrupted operation of the [Flexiglass] facility.
“Beautiful. Hungry. Keep away.”
Right. Killer butterflies. Of course. I very slowly looked down at Reina and widened my eyes, opening a proximity text chat.
[Message]
[Raziel]: I have MANY questions. First. Why did you bring me to a place with murderous butterflies?
[Reina]: The butterflies are not meant to be here. They are on a schedule; the next cleaning pass is in three weeks.
[Raziel]: Well, they’re here now. Does this mean the Ash Stag is no longer an issue, and we can get out of here?
[Reina]: No. Their default behavior is to spread out and fly around all over the facility. The fact that they are swarming but flying around aimlessly means that something is damaging the facility, but they haven’t been able to locate it.
[Raziel]: And this mist somehow hides us?
We looked up at the last of the butterflies disappearing in the distance. Reina held up a finger and counted to three, pressing another button on the canister. This time, the canister released a strong gust of air, pushing the floating particles away. Reina repeated this a couple more times, making sure the mist truly scattered, before nodding and removing her rebreather.
“Yes. The canister releases a mix of the liquids inside the [Flexigrass] in mist form. Allows us to hide, but it’s highly toxic and very easy to disperse by moving. Keep your rebreather on you in case we need to hide again.” She said.
I pulled out the rebreather’s strap and slung it around my neck. “How many more uses does this baby have?” I asked, nodding at the canister.
“Enough to reach the operations center, provided we are fast and keep our eyes out for any butterflies.” She said, turning towards a clearly marked path. “Come. Thankfully, I remember the turns we have to take.”
I dutifully followed her, turning my thoughts inwards, or rather... Pangolin-wards. “Hob, buddy, can you help out with these things?”
Hob, daintily sipping on a digital cup of tea with his pinky out, turned to me with a smug smile. “As a matter of fact, I can. Those butterflies are Techno-organic creatures. I managed to scan enough of them to grab their basic signature. I cannot track their exact position, but I can track their proximity to you.” He snapped his fingers, and a new item appeared in my vision. A little bar with a line halfway through that read “DANGER.”
“What’s this?” I asked him as Reina took us down the winding path, the grass around us occasionally swaying with the breeze.
“An indication of how quickly the signature gets closer. I was able to calculate the average speed of the swarm, so I will be able to detect when the signature is approaching us with sufficient speed to indicate it is heading towards us.” Hob said, taking another sip of his tea.
I sent him a mental thumbs-up. “Excellent work, bud.” I turned to Reina, who was checking the corner of a path before we walked past it.
“Keep away from the [Flexigrass],” she snapped at me as I got a bit too far from the center of the path.
I shrugged and decided to just walk behind her. “What, is the [Flexigrass], stupid name by the way, extremely fragile? Or is this dangerous too?”
Reina glanced back and nodded. “Dangerous. The edges are sharp enough that they will cut through steel. Keep to the center of the path. No matter how the grass sways, you will be in no danger of injury here. As for the name, yes. It’s grass made out of flexiglass, so [Flexigrass]. It is not the best of names, but it is better than this company’s previous product, the [Glass Grass]. Even people trying to sell the product kept getting tongue-tied.”
I threw my hands up in exasperation. “Why is everything in a facility meant to sustain life so deadly?!”
Reina shrugged with a smirk. “I don’t know, but it is funny now that I think about it.”
“Hold up,” I said as I noticed the bar in the corner of my vision filling up. It didn’t pass the quarter mark, but every step increased it slightly.
“What?” Reina asked, stopping and reaching for the canister. “Did you see something?”
“Keep the spray at the ready, but I think we should be safe if we stand still,” I said, getting ready to put on my rebreather.
After a few heartbeats, far in the distance, the swarm of butterflies flew perpendicular to our path. Reina looked at the butterflies and then back at me. “How did you do that? How did you know?”
I winked, “A pangolin living in my head helps me detect them.”
She looked blankly at me as if waiting for a punchline and regretting ever meeting me all in one. When I said nothing else, she turned to watch the swarm pass us by. “What have I done to deserve this?” I heard her mutter to herself. Once the butterflies were all gone, we kept walking in silence.
After an hour or two of quiet walking, the butterfly swarm appeared again, this time straight ahead of us, far in the distance, heading right for us. We repeated the trick with the mist, and once we were in the clear, the butterflies passed us and veered off to the left, disappearing above the grass-top.
“We’re almost there,” Reina said as she removed her rebreather. We set off again, but before taking more than five steps, a strong gust passed through the facility, the [Flexigrass] to my right smashing down on the path's edges with enough force that the metal floor almost rippled. I moved to be at the very center of the path, staring at the grass around me distrustfully. What kind of a death trap was this?
Reina gave me a look that clearly and smugly said, “See?”
I grunted in acknowledgment, shooing her onward. She chuckled and started walking again. The butterflies came close to us a couple of times, and we had to use the mist once again, but other than that, our journey was relatively smooth. Only three hours after we entered the ECF, we reached the operations center.
Or rather, what was left of it.
From what I could glean from the smoking rubble and slag, the operations center had been a medium-sized building comprised predominantly of glass and steel. “Seems like the Ash Stag was here,” I said, scratching my scruffy cheek.
“Yeah,” Reina replied, crossing her arms and huffing. “No wonder the [Clean-All Butterflies] are going crazy. The damned beast must have shorted something out.” Her eyes went unfocused briefly as she did something with her interface. She held her hands out, and a small six-legged robot appeared in her right hand. In her left hand was something that looked like a huge umbrella.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“Well, the robot needs to go into the rubble and try to see if it can find any accessible components. Maybe I can brute-force a shutdown sequence for the butterflies.” With that, the little robot jumped off her hands and scuttled on the metal floor toward the large pile of rubble. “And this,” She said, opening the umbrella with a grunt, “Is how we’ll protect ourselves while the robot searches. We were due for a break anyway.” A magnetic base secured the umbrella on the floor, and Reina pulled out of her inventory a small foldable chair and sat down primly. “Well, what are you waiting for? Come under the umbrella so I can activate the shield.”
I watched the sequence of events in astonishment as Reina appeared to be setting up for a picnic at a beach. She even placed a cute little table with a braided synthwood top to her left. I shook my head and walked under the umbrella, plopping down on the floor on the left of the table. Reina nodded once and snapped her fingers. A blue force field sprouted from the umbrella and created a dome around us. Then, the umbrella started emitting the green mist we’d been using as cover. The forcefield stopped any particles from entering, and any particles hitting the forcefield slid down like water droplets. The effect was quite pretty.
Reina brought out of her pocket a familiar palm-sized tablet and nodded, the tablet fizzling into the air.
“You have a remote food fab token?” I asked, curious. Those things were not very common on the Outer Ring.
A tea set, complete with biscuits and other snacks, appeared on the table. The tea was hot enough that I could see the steam rising from it.
“And, of course, you used it to make some tea and snacks,” I said, rubbing my temples.
Reina picked up a teacup and blew on the tea before sipping. “What’s wrong with tea and snacks? I chose Earl Grey. I know it's your favorite.”
I looked down at the table and grunted. “You used a token that can be used to feed thirty people at once to get tea. That feels a bit wasteful, is all.”
Reina looked at me over the rim of her teacup and smirked. “Well, it's really high-quality tea, and the snacks are delicious. I'll happily have your portion if you don't want any."
"Now, hold on," I said, cutting her off. "I didn't say I didn't want any." I grabbed a biscuit, and her victorious expression got even more infuriating once I bit into it. The blasted biscuit was delicious.
I grumbled as I took a sip from my tea, giving Reina a sour look, but my disapproval of her wastefulness was a bit undercut by the involuntary sigh I let out once I swallowed the divine-tasting tea. The entire thing must have been from the 2nd ring. Who was Reina trying to impress by pulling off this stunt?
Then again, if I had access to the resources she did, I'd be snacking on the finest Middle Ring snacks and drinks as well, so I was in no position to judge.
"Right," I said, clearing my throat. "Since we seem to have some time, let's get to business. What is this beast doing here? And how did it get here, for that matter? ” I asked Reina.
“Hm?” She asked distractedly, too busy enjoying the rich aroma of the tea blend. “Oh, well, it broke into this place from another environmental control facility. This place is responsible for oxygen production, but we have multiple other facilities for things like moisture and heat. The facility responsible for heat regulation is right next to this one. We believe it somehow found a crack in a wall where it could smell this facility, and it broke through to get here.”
"A crack in the wall? That's not very likely, is it? I don't know the specifics, but generally, facilities like these should have ways to automatically detect and repair any faults like that. Are you sure it wasn't one of your staff members moving from one facility to another and forgetting to lock the door?" I said, looking at the unmoving pile of rubble.
Reina shrugged. "I wouldn't know the specifics; it's the theory I was given, so I'm going with it. I'll let other specialists investigate and care about how it got here." She handed me a buttered crumpet, and I bit into it, letting out a groan of pleasure. It was so good I almost forgot to continue listening. "As for the why," Reina continued as if she didn't hear the noises that crumpet was forcing me to make, "The Ash Stag feeds on a greatly diluted version of the oxygen-producing fluid in the [Flexigrass]. It must have smelled the grass and decided it wanted a snack. Or many, many snacks, I suppose."
"So it's just looking for food?" I asked, feeling bad for the creature. I have no idea what kind of food an Ash Stag would find in a Heat Control Facility, but it must not be nearly as good as this.
Reina shook her hand in a noncommittal motion. "Partially. The fluid at these concentrations will probably have an inebriating effect on the Ash Stag, too."
"So, we are dealing with a gluttonous, drunk creature that can level a building," I said flatly. "Lovely."
Reina smiled at that and put down her teacup with a delicate clink. "It might work to our advantage. The Ash Stags are very dangerous at peak conditions. This one's overindulgence might slow it down enough for us to have an easier time dispatching it. We just need to figure out where it is. "
"That's fairly easy," I said, pointing at two spots in the paths far ahead and behind us, where the grass had been shattered and melted, creating two corridors of broken and drained blades.
Reina looked surprised, raising one eyebrow. "How can you tell?"
I looked back at her, equally surprised. "Reina, this is basic stuff. The one on the left has been shattered out, the glass shards going towards the building. The other one is going away from it."
She narrowed her eyes at me and glared. "I am aware it is basic stuff," she said in a frosty tone. "But I have perfect vision and can't even see that far. Did you get Nova augments? No, that can't be. I've only heard of urban legends of such augments existing, and most of them mention the Inner Ring in the same breath. Raziel, what is going o-."
She was interrupted by a loud beep coming from her wristwatch. She gave me a look that clearly said, "We're not done talking about this," and then swiped through her windows.
"Found anything?" I asked, eager to move the conversation away from whatever in Lost Terra was happening to me.
Reina nodded, distracted, humming in thought. "The bot found a partially working terminal. The comms conduit is destroyed, so I can't communicate with home to tell them to perform an emergency shutdown, but I can temporarily halt the butterflies for two hours or so. It should give us just enough time to find the Stag, kill it, and get the hell out."
"Uh," I broke in, raising my hand. "Better idea, we temporarily deactivate the butterflies, get the hell out, deactivate them for good, and then we come back."
Reina looked at me in exasperation. "Except while we'll be gone, the Stag will be free to destroy even more of the facility. In the best-case scenario, we'll have an even bigger mountain of credits to spend repairing this place. In the worst-case scenario, it finds the door we came through and breaks it, releasing the butterflies into the main compound. People will die. A lot of them. If everything was working as it should, all the openings in the facility should have been welded closed the moment the first butterfly was activated. We should not have been able to access this facility."
I nodded slowly. "Far enough. No leaving until the Stag is dead. We have the trail of our quarry, and the butterflies will be out of our hair for a while. Now what?"
Reina smiled evilly. “So. I have a plan.”
