The Archive III

'Well, it looks like my hunch was right,' Kies thought to himself. The archive was indeed in the tower, but neither of them had expected it to be something like this. Kies imagined it would be a highly advanced giant library of some sort where books were constantly floating around.

Ammine expected it to be more like a terminal where one can just enter something and information regarding that would pop out. They were both stunned to hear that the archive was an artificial intelligence instead, well, whatever that was.

"So... What is an artificial intelligence?" Kies asked, unsure where to direct his face since he didn't know where the voice was coming from.

"Think of me as a living being that is able to speak and think for myself, just minus the living part."

"So like a soulless," Ammine said.

"Close, but instead of flesh and a body, I am a machine," the voice said.

"I've been meaning to ask this, but what is a soulless?" Kies had forgotten to ask Ammine about it earlier.

"The humans call it the undead which is the term you should be familiar with," Ammine answered.

"Wait, they're not demons?"

"Didn't I tell you that before? We're similar in ways but I really can't see how you would confuse us as one kind." Ammine sounded quite displeased explaining that to him. It looks like she really didn't like people lumping her race together with the Soulless.

"So liches and vampires are not demons?"

"..."

Ammine glared at Kies like she wanted to kill him. Kies quickly apologized.

"Their magics are very similar but they are two different species. The easiest way to differentiate them is that demons are alive and the soulless are not," the voice explained to Kies.

"Nevermind all of that." Ammine wanted to move back on track on what they were originally here for which probably had something to do with the voice. "Do you have a name? Artificial intelligence is too long and I don't want to refer to you as you or machine or archive."

"You are free to call me Arc, Arch, Hive, or something else, whatever suits your preference," the voice suggested.

"Arc sounds nice," Kies agreed.

"Then please refer to me as Arc."

"Alright enough of that." Ammine was losing her patience again.

"Tonahl, if that is how to say his name, is gone. The last thing he said was 'archive' which is you. Why did he want us to find you?"

"Tonahl is gone..." Arc repeated. "While that was expected, it was not within my calculations for him to find the Stormcaller before he died."

"Stormcaller? Wait, are you talking about me?" Kies asked. He was unsure of his own identity and had no idea what the voice was talking about.

Ammine, on the other hand, knew who the Stormcaller was and was shocked when she heard what Arc had said. She looked at Kies with a puzzled expression. 'How...' From what she knew, the Stormcaller was the name given to the very first ruler of the Aeos, and they were the very first Aeos to fall when the Red Tides War had begun.

The Stormcaller chose to fight the war against the humans and their allies by themselves to protect the rest of their kind. They single-handedly wiped out more than half of the enemy forces and was brought down by the combined might of hundreds of mages, with almost all of them dying in the process.

The Archive was telling her that the person next to her was this Stormcaller. Ammine found it difficult to believe that Kies, who barely emitted any magic power was the Stormcaller. But it wasn't impossible to believe it. That day that Jokko had died, Kies was releasing monstrous amounts of magic. She did, however, find it a little strange how Kies wasn't releasing anywhere near the same level of magic that he was before. Even though Tonahl had broken his seals with that magic circle from earlier, Ammine couldn't sense anything different about Kies. Perhaps something went wrong?

"To be more precise, a direct clone of the Stormcaller," Arc clarified.

"What do you-"

"Oh, that makes more sense," Ammine interrupted Kies.

"What does that mean?" Kies asked.

Ammine explained that the Aeos reproduced by splitting their crystals and in a way, every Aeos after can be considered as clones of the very first Aeos. As the line went further down, the magic that clones use would branch out from the kind that the first one used. Since Kies was a direct clone of the Stormcaller, then his magic would be very similar to that of the Stormcaller.

"You have remarkable knowledge regarding the Aeos," Arc complimented Ammine. She summarized most of the important things so there was no need for Arc to explain much.

"Actually, how do you know all this?" Kies asked Ammine. The things that she had said sounded like rather classified information.

Ammine's eyebrows suddenly shot up. She silently cursed at herself for saying all of that. "You don't need to know," She said defensively.

Ammine was obviously hiding something but Kies did not pursue it any further. He had a feeling that he would end up getting hurt.

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