The Innkeeper

It had nothing to do with greed, it was a matter of honor. So, as honor entailed, Lex began to… no manipulate, no, never. He simply… aided the major in performing his duties by relieving him of the mental stress of carrying state secrets. Yes, Lex was practically a saint.

In fact, even the expression on his mask changed to that of an honest wide eyed grin .

"If they maintain their current scale of attack," the major began to answer, "then they won\'t be able to penetrate the formation. It is very strong. However, we cannot maintain it indefinitely. We only carry enough supplies to power the formation for two days."

In truth, this was confidential information that the major should not have been sharing. Lex should have had to work a little harder to get this information out of him. Yet the major had never faced real combat situations before. The stress of the situation had affected his judgment. The change was for the better, in Lex\'s opinion.

"When the formation was being designed, the council figured that if reinforcements didn\'t arrive, and someone was able to lay down siege on the facility for two days continuously, then this facility was probably the least of their problems."

"Makes sense. You said you\'ve already talked to someone, that must mean communication lines are back up. Have they said anything about reinforcements for this facility?"

"Yes! Reinforcements are already on their way. It should take a few hours though. According to HQ, alien presence in England is actually very small compared to Europe. I feel bad for them, but it\'s good for us. They expect to drive out all the aliens in a few days unless they get reinforcements of their own.."

"Good, good," Lex murmured while suppressing an internal curse. "This facility is pretty well guarded for a data center."

This time, the major was not as forthcoming as Lex had wished.

"It\'s important. Not only is a data center not cheap, but it holds all the valuable information of the council. That not only includes the private details of all the council members, but information on all of the council\'s various projects and responsibilities. If that weren\'t the case, we could have just used a commercial data center instead of building one ourselves."

"The building looks old. Did you have to renovate it to turn it into a data center?"

"I\'m not sure about such details. The data center was already up and running when I was posted here, and I didn\'t look into its history."

Lex only nodded, and decided instead to start sweeping the facility with his spirit sense. Walls posed no obstacle to his senses - or at least, they weren\'t supposed to. Deep underground in the facility, there were walls built of a special material that seemed to block spirit sense. Well, at least if he ever needed to… rescue earth\'s resources from invading aliens, he\'d know where to look.

But while his spirit sense could be blocked, his intuition could not. He could feel that whatever was stored deep down wouldn\'t personally benefit him or his cultivation, which diminished his interest somewhat.

"Here you go," said the major, leading Lex into a large hall. "This is the first of the server rooms."

The server racks were placed on top of metallic cages, which would allow cold air to blow up at them from underneath, not to mention the air ducts aimed at them from above. Despite the fact that there was no electricity, and the air conditioning clearly had not been turned on, the room was still chilly.

"The first room? How many rooms like this are there?" Lex asked as he gauged how many of these he could fit into his spatial bangle.

"There are 4 halls like this on each floor, and there are five floors of servers."

Lex would definitely need to make several trips to the Inn to transport all of these servers. He should really look into the Inns ability to turn items into cards that can be easily transported. That would save him a lot of trouble.

"Well then, I\'ll get started."

Wrapping the servers in his spirit sense, he directly transported them inside his spatial bangle, making sure to take as many wires as he could. Taking the servers to the Inn was only the first part. They would need to be turned back on and probably have to go through some configuration once that was done as well. Ideally, the servers should have already been prepared for transport by engineers, but one could not ask for everything during war.

The work was tedious, and while it bewildered the major, Lex felt like he was doing manual labor.

He had to make repeated trips to the Inn, and unload the servers and teleport back to the facility.

After 20 minutes, despite his speed, he was still not finished. But it seemed time was up, as the building rumbled, as if experiencing an earthquake. Lex paused, and turned to look at the major, who was also concerned but tried to put on a brave face.

"Worry not, this building is…"

He did not get to finish his words, as the sounds of explosions interrupted him, followed by more trembles.

"It seems the formation has failed," Lex said grimly as he spread his spirit sense upwards.