“What happened to the golems?” Coop asked, referring to the companions of the Hellhound.

The other opponents had been excluded from his duel thanks to the efforts of Lyriel. When he glanced up, he didn’t see any obvious smoke trails or other signs of demonic beasts falling from the sky, which was good, but given Lyriel’s continued lack of confidence, he doubted she defeated them herself.

“They did not give chase when we followed you off the bridge.” She stated with certainty. “Why should they, when their kin occupy the entirety of the Ark?” She added like it was the most obvious observation in the world. She then pointed behind him, toward the bottom edge of the innermost ring of compartments.

Coop turned, not needing to squint to see the lowest cells nearest to their position. Though they emanated auras that were powerful enough for him to feel even from a great distance, the cells had yet to discharge their occupants. Evidently, pursuit wasn’t necessary when so many forces were staged all over the Ark.

He winced at the sight of so many more cells, feeling like each compartment was essentially a ticking time bomb, both for him and his friends on the surface. The fact that there were so many monsters crushed any feeling of confidence he could take from defeating one Hellhound.

From where they stood, he could make out about 10 rings before their bottom edges blended in with each other, continuing forever. Knowing their heights left him feeling sick. If the Ark deemed them a threat, there was no escaping a fight. Its soldiers were everywhere.

Coop put his thumb and index finger on his forehead, genuinely worried about their chances if the forces of mana continued to track them, wondering what to do. If he followed his instincts and tried to take the initiative to force a confrontation before the enemies were fully awake, he risked escalating the response to their presence. It could easily get out of hand in a way they would never recover from. Even if he had the capacity to defeat the demonic opponents, he didn’t have the time to engage with their numbers.

As he looked down, rubbing his temple, thinking about his next course of action, he couldn’t help but note that they were standing on even more of the identical hexagonal compartments. He dropped his hand and shook his head at himself, not enjoying the implications, and already feeling the weight of overwhelming pressure form a knot in his chest. No matter how he looked at things, he felt like they were in trouble.

Coop resummoned his spear, finding confidence with its presence, as he came to the only possible conclusion that aligned with his basic philosophies. Lyriel was convinced that as few as a handful of the true forces of mana would overwhelm them no matter how they were confronted, but he wasn’t entirely on the same page. By defeating one Hellhound, even if it was the weakest example, he had proven they could fight. It may not have been a ringing endorsement of their chances, but it meant they were better than zero.

Looking back, even the very first Ancient Defender variant of the Primal Constructs had been an overwhelming struggle to overcome. Coop scowled, thinking that even without the system, he would find a way to progress. He vowed that he would turn the Hellhounds into the weaklings they were meant to be.

He wouldn’t let himself be caught off guard by any opponent, and he was frankly eager to prove himself again, but it seemed better to stay on task if he was going to fight. If the Ark only sent small groups after them, conserving the absolute majority for its efforts on the surface, they could still make good progress exploring the ship and he would inevitably get his chance to prove himself again. They shouldn’t have let him get one, because it changed the whole dynamic between himself and the monsters.

“We still need to find that command center.” He pointed out, feeling more like it was their best path to victory than ever before. More than anything, he didn’t want his allies on the surface to have to endure the absolute maximum that the forces of mana could offer, but he couldn’t know how long they had.

He forced his attention away from the cells and gazed at the spiraling tower, shielding the tube of mana in the center of the Ark. As a physical megastructure, it was beyond absurdity. They might actually be standing near the core of the entire planet, with the top extending all the way to the edge of space, and it was all held within a single alien vessel. He hummed to himself as he struggled with the madness of such a thing, no matter how he thought about it.

His eyes were drawn back down to the base of the tower, where a natural entrance had been formed by a careful arrangement of hexagons. “Does it have to be at the top?” He wondered out loud. “Why not the bottom?”

Lyriel just seemed dejected as she responded. “I don’t know anymore.” She seemed to consider it seriously but ended up shaking her head, unable to summon a shred of positivity.

“Let’s check it out.” Coop suggested, trying to inject some hope into the party. “Maybe it isn’t as far as we think.” He started moving, inviting them to follow. “The exact center might make sense too. Plus we can move a lot faster if we use our mana. I don’t think there's any point in holding back anymore.”

Lyriel didn’t respond, but she walked behind when Coop hopped forward, pointing his spear like a guideline before resting it on his shoulder. The base of the helical tower that climbed up the tube was proportionally enormous, though it could never quite seem appropriate for the height.

They passed through the massive half hexagon archway, mirrored on each side of the tube of mana. The high ceiling had a series of compartments protruding like sculpted art displays, protecting the start of the spiraling path upwards. The place certainly seemed to have more significance than any other random compartment, leading to Coop getting his hopes up.

The interior of the lobby was like a grand stadium with the massive tube of mana its central feature, absolutely dwarfing any of the other hexagonal patterns that broke the flat surfaces. Instead of the tube terminating at the bottom, the mana flowed up from the ground, making the whole Ark seem like it was siphoning energy straight from the planet, somewhere even further below.

Coop approached the tube, settling on one of several slightly raised tiles that appeared purpose built to be standing platforms. Once he was situated he gestured at Lyriel, shrugging to say ‘Here goes nothing,’ and mentally dove into the alien data stream by recreating one of the murals in his mind’s eye.

In a matter of seconds, he essentially experienced a vision, feeling like his consciousness was sucked down a drain as information flowed through. Though it might have been the first time he had properly utilized his access to the ship to get a formal answer, it had essentially been accidental, just repeating what he had already been doing in his previous attempts. It just happened that he deliberated upon the appropriate questions in the correct location with the perfect context.

The base of the tower wasn’t the command center, but something more like an archive that could reveal some history of the Ark. Coop had the sense that it was like a basement where information was dumped. He did confirm that the command center was actually at the top, among several other things as he was swept away on the currents of information.

The vision didn’t start at the genesis of a story, but rather shoveled the whole picture into his head at once, forcing him to work through it like a vividly remembered dream when it concluded. Still, it resolved questions that Coop was unwittingly asking. What were the forces of mana? Who were the Exiles? He hadn’t been approaching such mysteries with any particular academic curiosity. It was just that after defeating the Hellhound, he wanted to know his enemy more than ever. He fully anticipated getting into more fights with the different variants.

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The answer he got caused him to struggle with the knowledge just as much as the way it was presented clashed with his capacity to learn. The broader understanding of the story conflicted with almost every prior assumption with regard to both the forces of mana and the Exiles, whether it had come from Lyriel, himself, or his advisors.

Going back to the start, in time immemorial, long enough before the present that a contraction of the universe might have simply been the end of a previous iteration, there was a species who seemed a lot like humans in the very same Milky Way Galaxy as Earth. Physically, they were nothing alike, being made of something Coop understood as light and glass, but in terms of curiosity and inquisitiveness, they may have found common ground if they ever had the opportunity to meet.

They were beings of intricate thought, barely understood by whoever recorded the story. They had looked into the cosmos, believing that the stars hummed with conversation as they twinkled in the sky. They lived alone with their admiration, trapped where they formed, chiming to one another about what they saw. Their entire existence seemed premised on the desire to form a connection, but for a million reasons it was difficult, starting with their inability to move.

At first, they did their best to simply listen to the sound of the stars, wishing for nothing more than to join in, and over time, they found ways to learn the same way that life on Earth was driven to survive. They individually developed tools, and found ways to interface with each other, ultimately building societies. They started with simple technology, but as the eons bled into one another, they continued to progress.

Eventually, their increasing knowledge caused the symphony of the stars to fade. One by one, they realized the distant lights that flickered in their sky were actually quiet, the promise of kinship entirely one of their own imaginations. If there were ever songs, they had long been silenced by cosmic events or the inevitable entropy of time. The heavens were empty.

Despite this, they listened with increased desperation, improving and iterating on their efforts, teaching themselves new ways to communicate with the unknown, but their bright curiosity dimmed with every unanswered call. In the meantime, they conquered the frontiers of their planet, then their solar system, unwilling to completely give up, despite the oppressive silence warning them of nothing but disappointment.

The vastness of the universe had started as a source of natural wonder, but the more they explored their curiosity, the more the truth of it became a chilling expanse of solitude. They were the only note echoing in an empty hall, singing for nothing but the void. Whether they were too late or too early mattered little. They were alone.

Time flew by as it was wont to do, and as their loneliness consumed them, they pushed new boundaries. At some point they earned the ability to turn toward more direct means to form a connection. Their understanding of the universe had transcended even what humanity had achieved before the assimilation, and not by a small amount.

At that point in their story, Coop thought they might actually have become gods through the use of what he knew as mana, though they may have defined it in another way. It wasn’t clear if they discovered it or invented it, but for this story, they were the ones who mastered its use.

Desperate to rekindle the cosmic chorus that they had dreamed of, they turned to inspiring it themselves. Through mana they essentially gained the ability to touch the fabric of reality and consciousness, and they weren’t averse to trying. They hoped to guide the most promising patterns along a path of evolution that would establish them as their companions in an otherwise empty universe. They sought out worlds with potential, planets where enough chaos might spark even a hint of intelligence for them to nurture, not limiting themselves to the familiar.

Their efforts succeeded, uplifting a handful of early species. They gifted them with the opportunity to develop a utopian existence with the introduction of mana itself. The curse of life was death, but through mana, they shielded them all from hunger and struggle. They fostered the same curiosity that had driven themselves in the first place, attempting to nurture abstract thought and gently nudge new creatures into becoming their partners on a universal stage, inviting them to what was essentially paradise.

But, as virtually any human could have warned them, they were far too optimistic about their efforts. As the uplifted species grew in knowledge and power, their artificial curiosity led them down different paths than the ones that had been laid out for them. It was simply impossible to recreate the exact conditions that had fostered the original people, and the vision went awry. The uplifted civilizations descended into the shadow of suspicion, at first conflicting with each other in minor ways before rising to outright conflict. The original people had to step in and reestablish peace within the sandbox they had built.

When the uplifted species were presented with the disparity in control, analyzing not only their own power but even their existence and realizing that it was merely borrowed, they became paranoid. The original species was happy when their uplifted friends ceased their fighting, not realizing that their dream of harmony had already ended, fatally flawed from the start.

The uplifted species banded together, recognizing the threat represented by their mutual benefactors and turned against them. They used the very power that had been their gift to turn around and silence the songs of the dreamers.

Then, once that was done, the new alliance of uplifted species turned their paranoia on imagined threats elsewhere in the universe. To the original species, the stars had been full of hope and song and they had shared mana freely. To the new rulers, the universe was a menacing expanse of potential enemies just waiting to rise up, just as they did.

That was where the story truly overlapped with the one that Lyriel had presented when she still called herself the Avatar of the System. She only had the parties and the weapons mixed up, but the fundamentals were all the same.

The system was the solution drawn up by that first paranoid alliance. They would use it to cripple all life, conquering the universe for themselves while making sure that no one would ever rise above them. They enthusiastically used the gift entrusted to them to eliminate all who might pose a threat, instead chasing infinite expansion for themselves. They fought for the opposite of what the original dreamers had envisioned, hoping to prevent any unique voices from rising from the cosmos in favor of smothering the universe with their own.

The whole process of integrating into their galactic community was meant to prevent them from ever having a true rival, but in a twist of fate that actually made Coop laugh, the weapon that they created wasn’t only aimed outside of their alliance. Of course the treacherous civilizations turned on each other first, forcing themselves to be subjected to the same assimilation as everyone else. Naturally, they all failed the unexpected integrations, too advanced to be allowed to live, and they faced the Eradication Protocol one after the other, creating the blueprint for their weapons of mass destruction to carry into the future.

The first Exiles had been born from the survivors of those original species, and the first Icons were built from their physical specifications. The demons were but one example.

Put simply, the Exiles were the forces of mana.

The two were one and the same, at least at the start of the story. It seemed like over time they had changed, devolving into monsters, but the Hellhound and the other demons of mana were based on one of a group of original species whose conflict had set everything into motion.

Coop was just glad for a story that was simple enough for him to understand. The creations turning on their creator was a tale as old as time and in the founding of the galactic community it pretty much happened back to back.

However, as he shared what he understood, cleaning up his bloody nose, Lyriel really struggled. She was pointing out discrepancies in her own experience and not just in the information that had been passed down to her. Where Coop was satisfied with being granted a better understanding, she fought with it, resisting as much as possible before eventually coming to her own conclusion, with her long-running plan coming out on top.

“The root of it all is still mana.” She finally decided while Coop held his head back and pinched his nose, apparently so bad at learning, the information dump caused some to leak out.

“Kinda.” Coop hesitantly agreed, but he could tell they were more or less back to square one. Frankly, that was an improvement over giving in to despair. At least they were firm on their goal of reaching the command center at the top of the tower and taking control of the Ark.