The Villainess Returns with a System-Chapter 129: WARDUM!

The plan almost went south, but luck was on her side. She had a chance to take down Ian Grayson for good, too, but the lucky cockroach was on some sort of luck potion.

Vivian managed to deter most of the chasers and shoot the others, but she sustained a couple of bullets, which she was lucky enough to shrug off with her Aura. Still, her left arm and shoulder were not in an optimal state.

The last and most crucial part of the escape was the secret tunnels Voros made underground. As far as she could tell, there was one near the riverbank, and it was left open in case they needed to retreat fast. Vivian reached the river and jumped in, using her grappling gun to find the place, and then closed the wall behind her.

It was then an hour of blindly walking inside the tunnels until she found her way back to ViTech HQ.

Voros and Esmeralda seemed to have arrived on their own. Unlike the Duergar, who was very calm and collected, Esmeralda was...

"That was too reckless! I can’t stand this! You could have died! How could you do this?!"

Her state was a mess, and for the first time, she was even shouting at Vivian, who let her get it all out of her system.

"You are in shock, Esme. You did so damn good with that shot."

"God! No! I... I killed people, didn’t I? I killed them... I made the building fall on their heads."

"No one died unless I was the one shooting. Look! That building you shot was old and had rather thin walls; those guys were armored and had helmets on their heads. You killed nobody."

"How are you so sure?"

"Don’t worry about it, okay? I’ve seen guys survive much larger buildings with much less armor." ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

Vivian worked hard to assure her, but deep down, she knew she was lying. Esmeralda came from a pacifist society, but in a place like Elgard, such concepts cannot be afforded. If Voros is her shadow, Esmeralda is her cannon, but she needed a lot of training and mental preparation.

After managing to get her to calm down and sit silently, Vivian had a lot to unpack within herself.

Tonight was... how could she put it in words?

≪ Report—You have obtained a Reconnaissance Automaton Mech. ≫

≪ Report—System Upgrade Unlocked! ≫

≪ Directive—Extract the Required Part (Recon Antenna). ≫

≪ Magic—You have cast WARDUM! ≫

≪ Magic—The Passive Ability of [Unawakened Ring] has been set. ≫

≪ ERROR—System is rejecting the unfated ring. ≫

≪ SURVIVE—1646 SP has been awarded! ≫

Well... that!

She cast magic for the first time, and she actually stopped Ronald Morgan from hitting her with a spell using it.

It was unimaginable.

Actually, it was an act of absolute desperation, and all she did was imitate what Ronald did. She said "WARDUM" and moved her palm ahead, enabling an overwhelming sensation of protection to erupt in her chest, and burst force like a force she could never understand.

It felt like that time she used CHANTATIO when it was laid on her in the form of a rune during her speech in the street during the announcement of the light bulbs. However, that time the spell was something already cast by another, and she simply released it by some sort of keyword.

Magic... she can use it, and it made her heart race.

The System does not seem to like it very much. It made it clear that she was "supposed" to acquire another ring, but what is done is done. Stressing over it will not make her unpair with this ring; she at least knew that much, as it is impossible to pair with other rings like some Harry Potter wand.

But the other important thing is the new system upgrade opportunity which surfaced the moment Vivian laid eyes on the Automaton in the Kabal’s hideout. If not for her making good use of the situation, she would have had to return to it and steal it some other way.

But now... where to start?

She took herself to a corner and tried very hard to replicate spells she performed, but no matter how much she punched the air and shouted "WARDUM," nothing would happen.

Dispirited, she gave up and decided to revisit the topic later, since she had to go take a look into the System Upgrade situation and the Automaton she stole from the Kabalists. This required her to descend back into the secret tunnels alone and go to where she had her underground hideout established.

After laying it on a table, Vivian started to look through the whole thing intensively, gauging out all its parts and how it was made. No matter what she thought of it, this was not something that could have been created by human hands.

Vivian pondered over the situation a bit more, thinking of what Woodman and Amos Morgan told her. This Automaton was retrieved from Avalon forty-five years ago, and since it is alien to all Albionese tech, none of the conventional tools Vivian has, like screwdrivers and other tools, would work. For that, Vivian needed to be creative before she enlisted the help of Voros, or else he will be too absorbed in it and leave the other important work.

After some trial and error, Vivian finally found a way to dislocate the face plate of the Automaton by driving a flat-head screwdriver and pressuring a part of the plate under the chin, which acted as a locking mechanism. After that, the plate was easily separated from the Automaton’s head.

What was beneath it was something even she could not identify, but for a second there, she felt something strange, a hint of discomfort rising within her, before the feeling faded away.

Vivian shook her head, realizing that she may not have slept for more than twenty-four hours and was running on pure adrenaline all that time. No wonder she was having this godawful headache.

She tried to regain her focus after massaging her temples, squeezing her eyes, and shaking her head left and right. Once she regained a bit of her focus, she looked closer at what was beneath the face of the Automaton to find strange line patterns passing together in a strange matrix that rarely crossed each other.

She remembered seeing things like that before, circuit boards and the like. However, this type of circuitry seemed so steampunkish rather than something properly electronic.

Vivian flipped the whole thing left and right but never really found a power supply unit on the thing, and she was not really keen on cavemanning it and shocking the automaton with electricity.

"What now?"

Vivian asked herself and seemed bothered by the whole thing, but after using her ammeter device on different parts of the circuit, she actually found weak electrical current flowing within.

"God!"

Vivian was somehow shocked beyond words. The circuitry was so immaculate and advanced she understood little about what is going on with it, and she was one of the lead researchers in the matter of electricity, that is.

Did an ancient civilization rise on Avalon and achieve such levels of sophistication in technology?

If so...

If so...

Vivian held her jaw as she started to feel a tiny pain coming from her molars, as if she was having a bad cavity, then the pain started to increase and...

"What is this?"

The pain left her molar teeth and went straight to her right ear, growing steadily and making her ears hurt and ring, before it traveled once again, and this time, it reached her brain.

≪ You are under mental attack! ≫

≪ You are being subjected to the Curse of Pain through an unnatural link! ≫

"Wha..."

The pain started to sud2denly spread from her brain all the way to her eyes, ears, teeth, spine, arms, and legs, before...

SNAP!

"AAAAARGH!"

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