Back in Iron Reef, Leon, General Ren Nora, and Colonel Garfield took a trip to one of the most important landmarks in the capital city of the Freegrid Collective.
They took a trip to the cetery.
Built on the Western end of the city, the military cetery was no longer just a field of stone markers. This was a vast fusion of mory and technology.
This was where the mory of majority of the legends that built this city, and who fought and died for the rise of the Freegrid Collective were honored, immortalized, and laid to rest.
This was where the mory of every single one of the thousands of warriors that died on that last night 131 years ago were laid to rest.
This was where Lieutenant Colonel ndez was laid to rest.
This was where Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence was laid to rest.
This was where Lieutenant Colonel Potter was laid to rest, and this was also where Colonel Kai was laid to rest.
The cetery stretched across a quiet plateau overlooking the silent gacity. Unlike most parts of the world, over the past century, the caretakers of the cetery already took ti to plant and grow natural trees here.
This was one of the few locations in the world with natural trees that were not corrupted by ADE radiation.
The presence of natural trees ensured ventilation and oxygen, filling the cetery with a peaceful ambience that was conducive for sleep.
Walking into the cetery alone made Leon feel a sensation of sleep and peaceful slumber, it was soothing and felt like a therapy session to his ntal stress from his fragnted mories and also to his soul.
A cetery was supposed to be a place of sadness and mourning, but this cetery presented a different facet of it.
Instead of traditional headstones in the cetery, there were thousands of sleek, vertical markers that stood in perfect formation, each one a translucent monolith that was embedded with soft, pulsing light.
Each vertical marker represented a different legend of the Freegrid Collective, complete with an image and multiple epitaphs written on them.
From afar, the entire field looked like a constellation that had fallen to earth from space.
Besides, like Ren Nora already told him during the journey here, Leon knew that each grave was more than a marker.
Each grave here was a living archive.
Built with advanced projection technology, when a visitor approached, the monolith would awaken- projecting a life-sized hologram of the fallen soldier like a cinematic movie reel but all of it was real.
These projections weren’t static recordings, they were interactive echoes that were reconstructed from neural data, battlefield teletry, and personal logs.
All of this was the surface explanation to the public though.
The truth was that the main technology behind this function of the cetery was Ren Nora himself. With his Primordial Hacking, only he had the ability as the ’Glitch’ to piece together every detail of the past of these dead heroes.
Only he had the ability to hack into the past.
Even while dead and at rest, with this application of Ascended ability and advanced technology, you could still hear the voices of the dead. You could still see their mories and even ask them questions.
It blurred the line between rembrance and resurrection.
When Leon first heard about this technology from the General, he was not modest with his praise at all as he acknowledged the fact that this was perhaps Ren Nora’s greatest technological developnt.
Above the cetery, a network of silent drones drifted like distant birds, maintaining the atmosphere.
They adjusted the light levels of the field and projected weather conditions that were tied to significant battles. They also occasionally ford shifting patterns in the sky, reenacting key monts of wars long past.
On certain days, the entire sky would transform into a moving tapestry of history with battles unfolding in ghostly silence overhead.
This was a cetery but in recent years, it was more like a famous tourist location as worthy people were let in occasionally after paynt to witness the legends of the heroes of the Freegrid Collective.
They could only witness though, none of them were allowed to ask the mories questions though it was possible.
This evening, there was no single tourist except the 3 old friends. The cetery was already cleared out ahead of ti on the General’s orders.
The layout of the cetery followed military precision.
Military units and agent squads were buried together, arranged by formation and campaign, preserving the bonds that they once had in life.
Entire sections of the cetery glowed in different hues- blue for orbital forces, red for ground assault divisions, green for free agents who worked in the field outside Freegrid territory like Talia’s crew, and gold for special command units whose missions were still classified even in death.
At the center of the field stood the Eternal Core, a massive black structure that acted as the central mory bank of the cetery.
It was created partly with technology and partly with Ren Nora’s Primordial Hacking as the mory storage safeguarding the collective mories and stories of every soldier laid to rest here.
There were no sounds of grief here, no wailing and no chaos. Just quiet, a still and peaceful quiet.
The air was still, almost sacred.
Over ti, mourning heroes had evolved into sothing quieter and more introspective.
People didn’t just co here to rember their family or heroes, they ca to reconnect, to have one last conversation, and to seek closure in a world where death was no longer entirely silent.
It was not unusual for soldiers to co here and re-watch the mories of the legends of their father to reconnect with them after participating in especially grueling campaigns and combat missions, or when life beca tough in general.
This night though, it was 3 of the strongest Ascended in the city that ca.
The Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels were buried in the golden section of the cetery; ndez, Lawrence, Potter, and Kai were buried side by side.
Their vertical markers stood beside each other.
Leon took a deep breath as he observed the valiant faces on the pictures on each marker.
He smiled faintly, then he focused on the epitaphs.
...
[I wish there really was a cetery like this, I’d love to have one final conversation with my old man...]
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