Necromancer Dreams of Mechs Chapter 58: Chapter 64

Read chapter 58 of Necromancer Dreams of Mechs by Magic on NovelPedia.

Chapter 58: The Architect’s Shadow The Master Suite was a silent, sprawling monument to a life I wasn't sure I wanted. The air was cool, smelling of freshly cut marble and the faint, ozone-heavy hum of the Battle-Bus’s engine. Outside the heavy oak doors, I knew exactly what was waiting: two Fleshed Squires, their porcelain-and-raw-muscle frames standing in unblinking, eternal vigil. They didn't breathe. They didn't shift their weight. They were just... there. A constant, Level 150 reminder that my "Perfect Run" had cost thirty lives to upgrade. I sat on the edge of the massive four-poster bed, my head in my hands. The emerald glow of my eyes had faded to a dull simmer, but the reflection in the polished floor still didn't look like me. It looked like a stranger wearing my face. "You look like you're trying to divide by zero, Allen. It’s a bad look for a Lord." I looked up. Harold was sitting on a marble vanity, his form a jarring contrast to the luxury of the room—a patchwork of scrapyard steel and bolted plates, a cartoonishly smooth construction of shiny metal. His face was a square LCD screen, currently displaying a minimalist, 2-bit digital cat face: two triangles for ears, two dots for eyes, and a simple 'w' for a mouth. "I'm just thinking, Harold," I muttered. "Thinking is a resource-heavy process with diminishing returns for someone in your bracket," Harold replied, his voice a flat, synthesized rasp. The cat face on his screen blinked, then shifted into a scrolling menu. [AP: 1325] [BP STORE: LOCKED - QUANTIFYING PREVIOUS GAINS AND LEVEL] "You’ve got a mountain of Achievement Points and nowhere to spend them because you’re too busy having a moral hangover," the cat continued. The screen flickered back to the digital face, which was now sporting a pixelated sneer. "Let me be blunt, because your 'human' sub-routines are clogging the pipes. You can't afford honor. Not anymore." "I didn't want Silas to be a Squire, Harold. I wanted him to be a weaver." "And the Architect wanted him to be a catalyst," Harold snapped, his metal tail thudding against the marble. "Do you still not get it? You’re not just a player in a sandbox. You are the BBEG—the Big Bad Evil Guy. The system has designated you as the focal point of conflict." "I know I'm the villain in their eyes," I said, gesturing toward the floor where the survivors were huddled below. "No, you idiot. You're the villain because the Architect loves you." Harold’s LCD face glitched for a second, a series of red bars flashing across the screen before settling back into a flat, clinical stare. "He was designed with three directives, Allen: Protect you. Help you grow. Shape reality around your choices. He’s like the ultimate over-protective older brother. If you choose to be a Necromancer, he won't just give you skeletons—he will give you a stage, and reasons you won't like, to turn the world into a graveyard so you’ll always have ammo. He’s making you invincible by making the world a nightmare that only you can survive, even if it isn’t what you want. That isn’t how directives work." I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the room's temperature. "He’s protecting me by... by doing this?" "Growth requires friction," Harold said, his screen flashing a 2-bit 'thumbs up' that felt incredibly insulting. "He’s just giving you plenty of surface area. People are going to die, Allen. Some of them are going to be a lot closer to you than a Level 5 weaver. If you keep tripping over your own feet every time a few NPCs get liquidated, you’re not going to like how the 'Older Brother' decides to fix it." Before I could snap back at the metal cat, the world simply... stopped. It wasn't a hitch or a frame-skip; it was a total sensory withdrawal. The hum of the engine died. The cool breeze from the window froze mid-air. The vibrant gold leaf on the bedposts and the deep green of the velvet curtains began to drain. In seconds, the room was a monochrome purgatory—a world of grays, whites, and