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ArabicArknights: Soul Knights of Terra — Chapter 50
Chapter 50: You Have Been Kicked from the Group Chat
Vane blinked, his fingers pausing in mid-air as he instinctively pulled up the mental group chat interface.
“Oh! Number Two finally replied to the message…”
He skimmed Vera’s brief notification, scrolling through the otherwise quiet logs. No one else was speaking at the moment.
Just then, a wet, heavy appendage nudged his arm. The Shabby Warlord beside him, receiving no reaction to its previous attempts, had extended a slimy tentacle to poke him again.
Vane kept his eyes locked on the scrolling messages and waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t mess around, I’m busy.”
[Kin… need help?]
Vane’s spine locked instantly. The casual annoyance drained from his face. He turned around with agonizing slowness, staring at the pulsing creature, and asked tentatively, “Did you just ask if I need help? Kin?”
Unlike the vague, gurgling utterances from before, a crisp, clear response echoed directly inside his skull.
“Holy crap!!!”
Vane scrambled backward, his boots kicking up dirt as horror washed over his features. “A Seaborn is talking?! Did I just create a First Speaker!?”
[Holy crap?]
The alien mind tasted the syllables, its voice radiating pure, unadulterated confusion as it mimicked Vane’s exclamation.
Hearing the eldritch monstrosity repeat his profanity actually managed to ground him. Vane stopped scrambling and took a breath.
“Wait…” He pressed his fingers against his temples, closing his eyes to sense the connection. “This voice… it’s appearing directly in my head? You can communicate entirely through consciousness?”
The Shabby Warlord shifted its weight, waving a tentacle. The thought it transmitted carried a heavy, tentative clumsiness.
[Kin… thoughts.]
[Vague… perception.]
It was still adapting to this brand-new method of communication. Its vocabulary was painfully simple and its logic entirely linear, but it confirmed Vane’s wildest suspicion. He hadn’t just altered this Seaborn’s physical appearance; he had accidentally sparked genuine intelligence within it.
Vane’s eyes lit up with the manic gleam of a mad scientist. He rubbed his hands together, entirely forgetting his previous horror.
An excited thrill raced through his veins. He was going to try controlling this Seaborn directly.
He pushed his intent through their established mental link. The Seaborn immediately bounced back a clear wave of confusion.
[Control?]
Vane straightened his posture, wrapping his intent in a thick layer of righteous, noble indignation. “This is for a greater goal! To understand The Great Swarm more deeply, for our collective evolution!”
He had accurately grasped the core, foundational logic hardwired into the creature’s mind: unconditional devotion to The Great Swarm.
Sure enough, at the mere mention of the collective, the Seaborn’s simple mind abandoned all hesitation.
[For The Great Swarm, flesh is given to kin. Please… use.]
It worked!
Vane praised his own genius inwardly and immediately calmed his breathing, focusing the entirety of his consciousness into a single point.
A brief wave of intense dizziness washed over him, followed by a sudden, jarring sense of detachment. When Vane opened his eyes, the world had fractured into a bizarre, composite perspective. Colors bled into strange spectrums, and the air tasted thick with chemical signatures.
With a mere thought, several tentacles lashed out, striking the ground with a wet, heavy smack.
‘Success! Is this the world through a Seaborn’s eyes? No, now is not the time to study marine biology!’
Suppressing his burning curiosity about the alien anatomy, Vane forcefully circulated the energy of his Immortal Body within the Seaborn’s frame.
A familiar, blood-red aura bled through the pale chitin. Although the flow felt slightly sluggish compared to his original Vampire physiology, the crimson light stabilized. It was successfully activated.
‘It works! It actually works! Skills can be adapted across entirely different bodies!’
Vane, currently piloting the Seaborn, excitedly waved his tentacles in the air.
Now for the critical phase.
Settling his mind once more, Vane attempted to cleave his consciousness perfectly in half. One tether would maintain a firm grip on the Seaborn’s nervous system, while the other snapped back into his original form.
A wondrous, deeply disorienting sensation bloomed in his mind. On the left side of his perception was the fractured, chemical-tasting world of the Seaborn; on the right was the familiar, grounded reality of his own two feet. He was looking at himself from two entirely different angles simultaneously—the hulking, crimson-glowing Seaborn, and the motionless original Vane standing a few paces away.
“Begin the test!”
Vane manipulated the Seaborn’s heavy musculature, whipping a thick tentacle viciously toward his stationary human body.
The moment the wet flesh made contact, the blood-red light of the Immortal Body flared violently on Vane’s original form. The kinetic force of the attack was instantly absorbed and nullified.
But more… the energy reserves within the Seaborn’s body spiked!
‘Just as I expected!’
His previous theory was absolutely correct. Immortal Body did not rely on a specific biological structure to function. Back when his ability had merged with Gusi’s skill, he had caught a fleeting glimpse of this truth. As long as a sufficiently strong “link” existed between two entities—whether forged through blood, mental synchronization, or pure energy resonance—the damage-absorbing properties of Immortal Body could be shared across different individuals. Even across entirely different species.
And on the unforgiving land of Terra, what creature possessed a more plastic, adaptable physiology than the Seaborn? They were biological machines built explicitly for evolution.
This Seaborn was the ultimate external energy buffer. A living, breathing spare blood bag.
Not to mention, deeply embedded within this creature’s mind lay a direct tether to something far more terrifying. An unfathomable, ocean-spanning network.
The Great Swarm.
‘If I could connect to The Great Swarm…’Vane’s dual-minds raced.’No! I definitely can connect to The Great Swarm!’
Vane submerged his consciousness entirely, diving into the dark, quiet depths of the Seaborn’s mind to find that elusive tether.
Far away.
Silence was the absolute ruler of the Sea Abyss.
Here, time rotted away into meaninglessness. The crushing, lightless depths swallowed all sound and suffocated all warmth. Yet, in the very heart of this forbidden zone—where even the most resilient deep-sea predators would be crushed into paste—a certain existence rested.
A sleeping, living mountain range.
A massive, pale corner of her form loomed in the suffocating darkness. Even a fleeting glimpse of her sheer scale would shatter an ordinary mortal’s comprehension of biology.
She was Ishar-mla. One of the four Firstborn of the Seaborn, the Corrupting Heart who presided over migration and struggle.
At the exact microsecond Vane’s consciousness used the Shabby Warlord as a router to ping The Great Swarm—
Deep within the absolute black of the Sea Abyss, an energy pattern woven from faint bioluminescence flickered softly.
She… responded to the kin’s call.
Vane’s consciousness was instantly swallowed by an total, freezing silence. It wasn’t empty; it was a grand, deafening background noise constructed from billions of microscopic thoughts.
It felt exactly like plunging naked into freezing seawater. Just as Vane hesitated, debating whether to sever the link and run, his mind fully breached the firewall of The Great Swarm.
[Hungry… hungry…]
[Fish school discovered, coordinates…]
[Capturing food, returning to the nest.]
[Enemy! Land creature! Aggressive! Expel!]
[Kin trapped… rescue.]
[Environment changed… lost, returning… recalibrating.]
Billions of thoughts intertwined, flashing across the biological network in a blinding stream of data. They originated from Seaborn of every conceivable shape, scattered across countless oceanic territories. The content was a chaotic mess of survival instincts, yet the network itself operated with a terrifying, flawless harmony.
And anchoring this massive, churning sea of data were a few grand wills, resting at the absolute bottom of the Sea of Consciousness.
Two of these massive presences were entirely quiet, sunken into an eternal slumber.
One emitted a faint, steady, unbothered pulse.
And the last one…
It was focusing its immense, crushing gaze directly onto him. The newly connected, glaringly out-of-place node.
[Kin, status abnormal.]
The grand will transmitted a single, piercing thought. It was cold, ethereal, and utterly devoid of emotion.
[Return to The Great Swarm… synchronize… purify abnormality.]
A suffocating sense of security, like the warm, inescapable embrace of the womb, wrapped tightly around Vane’s mind. It pulled at him, tempting his ego to dissolve and merge peacefully into the endless Sea of Consciousness.
Vane violently jolted. He cranked the Immortal Body to its absolute maximum output, using the energy to forcibly anchor his ego and resist the assimilation.
For the first time in an eternity, a ripple of genuine confusion echoed from Ishar-mla’s thoughts.
[Why refuse to return?]
Sweating bullets in the real world, Vane instinctively wanted to crack a joke to ease the crushing tension. But in his rising panic, he completely forgot that he was currently existing as pure consciousness.
Whatever he thought would be broadcasted directly to the server.
Before he could bite his mental tongue, a loud, obnoxious, and utterly meaningless greeting exploded from his node, sweeping across the entirety of The Great Swarm like a digital virus:
[Hai hai hai!]
Ishar-mla: [?]
The grand will stalled. A massive, divine entity froze, processing an emotion it fundamentally lacked the capacity to comprehend.
Even the flawlessly efficient machinery of The Great Swarm ground to a halt, choking on this completely unparseable string of data. Billions of Seaborn paused their hunting, swimming, and devouring, trying to decode the strange information. They found absolutely nothing.
Driven by their foundational instinct to mimic and adapt, the confused Seaborn subconsciously repeated the corrupted data packet.
[Hai hai hai…]
[Hai hai hai!]
[Hai hai hai!] x N
Before Vane could even process his catastrophic mistake, a deafening, oceanic chorus of “hai”s violently assaulted his mind.
The Great Swarm fell into total, unmitigated chaos.
Just as Vane was desperately trying to find the log-out button, an ethereal, absolute force swept through the network.
[Ishar-mla used The Great Silence. It’s super effective.]
The billions of Seaborn instantly snapped back to factory settings, ceasing their spam. The Great Swarm regained its cold stability.
Ishar-mla’s crushing gaze refocused entirely on Vane, the source of the infection.
This kin’s consciousness possessed a severe, highly virulent “polluting nature.” After a brief microsecond of processing, operating on the core directive to eliminate all threats to The Swarm’s stability, Ishar-mla executed her judgment.
Vane had barely recovered from the shock of the forced silence when an irresistible, god-like force slammed into his mind.
The composite vision shattered. The taste of chemicals vanished, instantly replaced by the familiar, grounded tactile sensations of his own human skin.
He was back. Violently shoved back into his Vampire body.
Vane stood frozen in the dirt, his expression twisting into a complex, indescribable grimace.
[Ishar-mla has kicked you from the group chat.]
Vane stared blankly at the air for a long moment, before his gaze slowly drifted toward the other captured Seaborn writhing in their pens.
‘So my main account got banned. Can’t I just register an alt?’
Meanwhile, in the crushing depths of the Sea Abyss.
Having successfully purged the corrupted node, Ishar-mla withdrew her focused attention. To a being of her magnitude, countless kin were slaughtered every second in the endless cycle of predation and migration, while millions more were born to replace them. She would never, and had no biological need to, feel anything resembling sadness over the loss of a single unit.
Her consciousness settled back into absolute calm, mirroring the eternally silent deep sea.
However, the peace lasted less than a minute.
That exact same, highly infectious consciousness attempted to violently plunge into the deep sea once again, this time routing its connection through a completely different Seaborn individual.
Ishar-mla: […]
[Ishar-mla refused the connection.]
“Oh, holy crap! She actually IP banned me?!”
Back on the surface, Vane’s face flushed a deep, furious red. He felt exactly like a gamer being maliciously targeted by a power-tripping server admin. A surge of petty anger ignited in his chest.
“I refuse to accept this!”
He immediately shifted his mental target to a third Seaborn. Then a fourth. Then a fifth. Vane aggressively used every single mutated Seaborn in his vicinity as disposable proxy servers, hurling a relentless barrage of connection requests at The Great Swarm.
For a brief period, a massive flood of pings—all originating from different biological units but carrying the exact same corrupted signature—surged against Ishar-mla’s firewall one after another.
Ishar-mla’s will remained perfectly silent.
Her silence wasn’t born from annoyance or exasperation. As a divine, biological supercomputer devoid of human emotion, she simply did not possess the capacity to feel annoyed.
She was merely calculating.
This specific abnormality possessed a highly aggressive diffusivity and repeatability. Would it continue to endlessly assault the purity and stability of The Great Swarm? If left unchecked, would this anomalous data packet eventually evolve into a genuine, systemic threat to their survival?
After a brief calculation, Ishar-mla reached a conclusion.
She needed to re-evaluate the threat level of this anomalous unit. If its existence was definitively proven to pose an uncontrollable risk to the collective, then… total physical and mental erasure would be the most efficient solution.
Vane’s connection request was suddenly approved.
The moment his consciousness crashed back into the Vast Sea, before Ishar-mla could even begin her diagnostic scan, Vane immediately broadcasted his opening move.
[Ishar-mla! I’ve come to bargain!]
[Rhodes’s Note: “Hai hai hai!” is a loud, obnoxious greeting popularized by Chinese internet meme culture (often associated with eccentric streamers), used here to show Vane accidentally polluting the hive mind with premium brainrot. “I’ve come to bargain!” is, of course, a reference to Doctor Strange confronting Dormammu.]