Arknights: The Prophet of Penguin Logistics — Chapter 66

Chapter 66: The Abyss Ahead, and Behind

“Silence, do you know much about the faith of the Laterano people?”

“I do. Why do you ask?”

“Because over these past three months, I feel as though I have witnessed the very miracles those zealots preach about. Science… science was never supposed to look like this.”

“Such an ugly, twisted thing.”

Saria stood near the reinforced observation deck, her cross-patched Rhine Lab Director uniform snapping in the harsh, ash-choked wind. Her gaze was locked on the distant horizon, where grotesque, writhing mounds of biological residue stained the scorched earth. Even her eyes, usually as cold and unyielding as cut diamond, harbored a rare flicker of deep bewilderment.

“It is too fast.”

She watched the massive, heavily armored landships patrolling the jagged defensive line. The air itself seemed to carry the auditory hallucinations of endless wailing from the mountains of corpses blanketing the plains below. Saria closed her eyes, letting out a slow, measured breath. A heavy, suffocating weariness settled deep within her chest—a fatigue born not of physical exertion, but of fundamental ideological collapse.

True scientific progress could never be achieved overnight. It demanded the rigorous accumulation of data, the slow grind of trial and error, and the steady passage of time. Saria was no pedant; she was a pragmatist. Once a theory’s feasibility and safety were verified, she would not hesitate to authorize human experimentation. She valued order above all, but she was never blinded by rigid morality.

Yet, the contents of the Lazarus file defied every law of order and chaos. It read like the fevered ravings of an absolute madman, a cacophony of chaotic noise masquerading as research. No rational mind would ever entertain the theories written within its pages. But reality had played a cruel, sickening joke on her. Every insane, impossible concept recorded in that file had manifested into reality. They had produced terrifyingly effective results, weaponized in ways that stripped away the very definition of humanity.

“We are safe now, Saria. It is over for us.”

A soft, trembling voice broke through the howling wind. Doctor Silence stepped up behind her former colleague, offering a fragile attempt at comfort.

“Ifrit managed to escape with us, and the majority of our staff made it out unscathed. The core professors and directors of Rhine Lab survived the purge. We lived through it, didn’t we? Besides, Raythean Industries has already agreed to garrison our facilities against Umbrella Technology’s assaults. That has to be enough.”

“No, Silence. That is precisely what concerns me—”

“—If Director Saria is doubting the defensive capabilities of our mechanized divisions, you may lay those fears to rest. Nothing born of flesh will ever breach our steel.”

A gravelly, arrogant voice interrupted them from the shadows of the command tent.

An aging but heavily muscled Forte stepped forward, his tailored corporate-military uniform a stark contrast to the blood-soaked researchers. He completely ignored the deep frowns etching both Saria and Silence’s faces. Instead, he swaggered to the railing, proudly patting the reinforced metal as he gazed out at the moving mountains on the horizon.

They were not mountains. They were colossal prototypes, forged from classified schematics that Raythean had kept buried for decades. The sheer scale of the machinery recorded in those black-project files was too miraculous, too terrifying to have been constructed in such a brief window. Yet, the verification units alone were enough to grant the industrial giant absolute confidence—enough to openly challenge both the fractured Columbian government and the rising nightmare of Umbrella Technology.

“Colossus, Titan, Celestials… call them whatever helps you sleep at night,” the Forte rumbled, a smug grin splitting his weathered face. “They are merely a fraction of the war machinery we are prepared to unveil. We promise to end this civil war. Whether it is Rhine Lab, Umbrella Technology, or the splintered factions of Columbia, what we desire is a unified, profitable nation. That is why we have extended our protection services to you at such a steep discount. Our four primary prototypes and the newly constructed fortress-series armaments will crush any enemy that approaches your borders.”

“Is that so…” Saria’s voice was dangerously quiet.

“Naturally. As the apex industrial powerhouse of the modern world, we possess manufacturing capabilities you lab coats cannot even fathom. When it comes to war, we are the undisputed masters. Umbrella Technology is nothing but a cabal of deranged upstarts playing God with test tubes. They will break themselves against our shields. Optimistically? Give it three months. Columbia will return to its rightful, profitable track, and your Rhine Lab will once again sit at the top of the biological research sector.”

Saria turned her head, her golden eyes piercing through the Forte. “And the price for this salvation is that I hand over the Umbrella Technology data files to you. Correct?”

“Just a minor formality of our contract,” the Forte chuckled.

The Lazarus file.

Compared to the visible, crystalline horrors of Oripathy, facing this invisible, mutating enemy filled Saria with a cold that froze her blood.

It felt as though a massive, unseen hand was scattering cursed seeds across the entire continent. Everything conservative, everything orderly, everything regulated by the laws of nature was being violently rewritten. It was spreading at a sickening velocity, mutating the world in the cruelest manner imaginable.

She stared at the smug smile plastered across the Forte executive’s face. It was the exact same smile the former Rhine Lab director had worn the day he defected to Umbrella Technology.

It was the smile of a man entirely consumed by an idea. The look of someone who believed they had heard the whispers of a radiant god, willingly sacrificing their humanity for a taste of the divine. They craved the chaos. They hungered for the model shift. The Forte’s expression as he admired his steel monstrosities was utterly indistinguishable from the defected director staring lovingly at a pulsating sarcoma in a petri dish.

It was pure, unadulterated madness. They all believed they had grasped some higher truth, looking down upon the rest of the world from a pedestal of arrogance.

It was the very expression Saria loathed above all else.

‘Have I merely barred the door against one demon, only to invite a devil through the window?’

As she watched the towering steel defensive line slowly taking shape along the jagged edges of the Great Rift Valley, a dark, heavy shadow fell over Saria’s diamond-hard resolve for the first time in her life.

It was the terrifying bewilderment of watching her known reality collapse. She could not comprehend how it had happened. On the surface, the sky and the earth remained the same, yet the fundamental rules of existence had been shattered. Her intuition screamed that the world was not supposed to be this way, but the blood-soaked reality before her offered no mercy.

“Why did it have to come to this…”

Her gloved hand drifted up, pressing tightly against her Rhine Lab badge. Bathed in the dim, ash-filtered sunlight, the woman renowned for her unbreakable will finally showed a crack of deep, quiet despair.

But steel possessed no voice to answer her; it only executed its programmed slaughter, step by mechanical step.

Three months after the initial outbreak of the Columbian Civil War, Raythean Industries officially announced their intent to pacify the conflict through overwhelming force. Forging a military alliance with Rhine Lab and the Southern Kingdom, they began establishing a massive, impenetrable blockade along the geological scar of the Great Rift Valley.

Tyre, Sidon, Sodom, and Gomorrah.

The four colossal prototypes were deployed to the four strategic corners of the valley, their massive weapon systems trained relentlessly on the territories controlled by Umbrella Technology and the Northern Kingdom.

The Columbia Joint Government had been reduced to a hollow name. The global headquarters of Blacksteel International was forcibly dissolved, its elite mercenaries absorbed directly into the Columbian military apparatus. Countless retired veterans were dragged back into service, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with terrified, drafted youths. Together, they marched into the meat grinder in a daze, forced to adapt to increasingly bizarre, grotesque technologies and alien combat doctrines.

And as the slaughter dragged on, more and more eyes from across Terra began to turn toward this deadlocked, nightmarish front line. They watched the deployment of weapons that defied all logic, displaying epoch-making destructive power, and slowly began to realize the terrifying truth of what was truly awakening in the dark.

[Rhodes’s Note: Raythean Industries was contextually restored here; the raw text incorrectly attributed the Forte military contractor’s dialogue to Rhine Lab, creating a logical paradox where Rhine Lab was selling protection services to itself.]