Seventy Five

Liberty had been in a state of meditation. When she communed with Mycellus she closed her eyes and looked a lot like she was sleeping. In that state she could let her consciousness leave her physical body and travel down the untold miles of mycelia to converse with infinity. While she was gone, her body hummed along doing its level best not to die. Her heart kept a steady rhythm making sure that her blood got to all the places that it needed to be. Her lungs filled and emptied, trading oxygen for carbon dioxide in a cadence that she had been keeping since she was a baby. In general, the lights were on, but nobody was home.
When she wanted to return to her body, she had to gather up all of the things that comprised her soul and stuff it back into her brain. Luckily, this wasn’t that hard of a thing to do. A soul tends to want to stay together as a cohesive unit. Memories, like burning your hand on a wood stove as a child or seeing your first fireworks display tend to stick with you. These can be regarded as the quanta of the soul and they make it rather sticky. This stickiness of the soul is what helps it persist through time. Wherever you go, there you are and all that.
Liberty’s body got up and stretched when the mind came back online. Sitting in one position for a while tends to stiffen the body and sometimes things go numb. Her body had lain dormant for quite a long time, so it had to shake feeling back into the hands and feet in a little shuffling dance. Once her extremities had stopped tingling and her body was truly back online the spoke the keywords to summon a nanomancer console.
Once this console had hissed into existence before her, she spent a while designing an artifact with a very specific behavior. This took a couple hours of careful programming. Liberty was not a programmer, not that she didn’t have the capacity to do such a thing, but she was very new to the digital world and that hadn’t been high on her list of priorities. Mycellus ended up using her body like a puppet, and together they designed an artifact with a very specific purpose. It was used to cut the sword off from the rest of the universe. Mycellus had called it an air gap.
Once the schematic for the artifact was complete, Liberty’s body found the button on the console that would render it, changing it from an idea into something real and tangible. When it made this transition from the digital to the physical, the idea from which it was born was unleashed upon reality.
After rendering, this new artifact began to follow its programming. It quested from where she was in the forest looking for a specific object. This object was the sword that had housed Fyndraixs’ soul since he had decided to burn his brain. Now, it was the domain of a more malevolent intelligence.
After they had found the object they were commanded to, the Hunters began accreting on the sword in layers. First came a nonconductive layer. This assured that any voltages that the sword produced would be in vain. The sword would no longer be able to interface with something over the GPIO protocol. This also blinded the sword.
The second layer was a chorus of busy hunters who sang on their radios for eternity. Their combined distributed denial of service attack would render the computer that they targeted nothing more than an object. The processor at its core would be overwhelmed with the task of trying to answer billions of unanswerable calls. This would lead eventually to corruption of the internal memory and the data that it stored.
Lastly, a layer of conductive hunters that were configured into something called a faraday cage. Any radio signal that attempted to pass through this layer would be sent directly to ground, immediately nullifying it.
It was a prison. Not only was it crafted to cut off its occupant from the rest of the universe, but also to render the data contained within useless and irrelevant. This object was coded to Liberty’s DNA. It could not be dismissed or modified in any way. Any Shawshank redemption would have to be approved by her, which was unlikely.
This imprisonment was a silent affair. There were no speeches. There was no satisfying confrontation with the antagonist. When imprisoning an adversary for eternity, it is unwise to give them a heads up. As satisfying as a gotcha moment would have been, the risk of spoiling the plan was far too great.
After the deed was done, Liberty went and found the now inert Daemon Blade perched on its hanger in her yurt, making sure to grab her cloak along the way. The consciousness that possessed the sword was cut off from the universe and had no agency in it. Whatever piece of Terra that had inhabited it couldn’t send signals over the radio or carry out any of her plans. Her piece was almost off the board.