by Jez Cajiao
“Yes, Jax, that is my work.”
“Coolio, thanks again, buddy!”
I dismissed the connection to Seneschal and turned to Oracle. “Your connection with me… are you still connected to the Tower and the others too?” I asked, an idea coming to mind.
“Yes, of course. What are you thinking?”
“If I create a minimap in my HUD, can you populate it with data from Seneschal? Such as showing the golem corpse locations?”
I saw the look on her face and took a deep breath. This was going to take some time to explain, I just knew it.
In the end, it didn’t take as long as I’d expected, and after an hour of experimentation, I had a minimap in the top right of my vision. It faded into the background unless I concentrated on it, so it wasn’t as distracting as I’d feared. With the map in place and Bob clearing the last of the debris away, I moved over and helped him out, using my combination spell again to create boiling hot water. I washed the pile down until it was clean enough that I thought I could handle it without vomiting. As I finished, I noticed Bob staring at me with what I could only assume was reproach. He was covered in literal crap, mud, and fungus, and here I was refusing to touch the pile he’d uncovered until it was cleaner.
“Sorry, Bob.” I said, turning the same combination of spells on him, leaving him cleaner and seemingly, even if only in my mind, happier.
Once I was finished playing cleaner, I turned to inspect the pile of rubble. Sometimes the chunks were solid stone, while others were marbled with what my ‘Identify’ spell recognized as metal alloys: copper, tin, steel, a few I didn’t recognize and even a few trace amounts of gold and silver. Eventually, I found the core, or what I assumed were remnants of it. The bronze and silver bands were shattered, and the ruby had cracked like glass.
Destroyed Golem Core
Further Description Yes/No
Details:
This magical artifact forms the core of a multiuse golem but is damaged beyond repair.
Rarity
Magical
Durability
Charge:
Rare
Yes
0/100
0/100
After using my spell to be sure, I chucked the core aside onto the pile of rubble and useless bits we’d uncovered. There was a significant load of useful ores in it, but I had no way to remove them at the moment, so they’d have to wait until later. Bob and I moved onto the next pile indicated and began to work. The two of us working together uncovered it much more quickly.
Again, the core was shattered, but we also found more piles of metal and gem-infused stone, so we went on. For the rest of the day, we worked with Oracle standing guard over the nearest entrance, despite Seneschal’s reassurances that we were safe. We cleared three more individual corpses, and finally sorted through a pile of nearly a dozen corpses out in the open area beyond the Tower.
I stood over the intact head of a golem, the first I’d seen, and examined the features. It seemed to be asleep, a carving of a handsome male face, surrounded by waves of alabaster hair. As I looked at the head, I realized the hair was laid as though it had solidified after death. The head was laid on its side, eyes closed in death or sleep, with debris piled around it. The hair had been crushed on one side, where the weight of the head had compressed it against a piece of a leg.
For long seconds, I looked at the serene face, wondering about the last sight those eyes had seen, when Oracle flew over to me, shaking me out of my daze.
“You found one!” she shouted, spinning around me before landing lightly by the head and stroking its face. “Sleep well, honored fallen,” she whispered, gently kissing its cheek.
“Wait, what?” I asked, confused as I watched Oracle.
“A core! I did tell you that War golems have the cores in their heads, didn’t I? It’s intact, I can feel it!”
“A War golem? No, you didn’t tell me that,” I said quietly, crouching next to the head where it lay half hidden in the dirt. I carefully swept the soil free, lifting the head with a grunt.
Balthazar Core
Further Description Yes/No
Details:
This is the intact head and core of the golem warrior Balthazar, Knight of the Second Circle and thrice honored duelist. His memories were transferred into the golem core upon his death at his request, so that he may continue to serve the Empire.
Rarity
Magical
Durability
Charge:
Unique
Yes
87/100
0/100
I read the details before looking back at the head that I held in my hands.
“He transferred his memories into the core. Does that mean what I think it does?” I asked quietly.
“He was a soldier of the Empire, a high ranking one. I remember him, a little. War golems are generally simple constructions, but the higher level they are, the stronger they are, and the more capacity they have for memories and abilities. I thought him lost, but all this time, he was sleeping. Balthazar was the leader of the Tower’s War golems, and was a highly intelligent, capable warrior.”
“Can we restore him?” I asked, looking at the body parts nearby. It was easy to pick out the parts that had come from him. Where others were constructed from limestone or granite and a little base metal, some tin and iron, his body was as different as night and day. His primary material had been white marble interwoven with faint traceries of gold. I tried my Identify spell on the metal that had coated sections of him but got nothing. Whatever he had been, it was a far cry from the others.
“It’s probably possible to restore him; well, I think it is, but he was a Golem Lord. we’d need to fully rebuild the Genesis Chambers to their old state and have a lot of materials ready. But it’s probably possible.” Oracle said, sounding unsure.
“Well, he gave his life for the Empire; twice already, in fact. I think he deserves us trying at least, don’t you?” I asked her.
Surprisingly, it was Bob that responded first, moving forward and reaching out with one clawed hand to pat the marble head in my hands. It was awkward and nearly drove the head through my hands and onto the floor, but when I looked up at him, staring into the red light that glowed out from the depths of his eye sockets, I couldn’t help but smile.
“Looks like Bob agrees,” Oracle said softly, landing on my shoulder and smiling up at the giant skeleton. He straightened up, returning to clearing the ground and uncovering bits of corpses, but every once in a while, he looked over, as though considering.
“Yeah, I think that’s the first sign of life from him, isn’t it?” I whispered to her as we watched my minion work.
“There have been a few others, nothing I could be sure of, but yeah, that’s definitely him being, well, him I guess.”
I grinned at her and we went back to work. I tried talking to Bob, as did Oracle, but either he wasn’t ready to talk, or couldn’t yet. It took the rest of the day to clear the section we were working on. When we finally hauled it all to the third floor, the location I’d picked as my base, we were all exhausted. I took an inventory of the parts I’d managed to free that Heph said were usable, and he’d estimated the amount of materials we could get from the rest, once we had access to a smelter, anyway.
Golem Cores:
1x Balthazar Core
2x Golem Core
Materials:
Copper x42 ingots
Gold x3 ingots
Iron x17 ingots
Lead x4 ingots
Orichalcum x11 ingots
Starsteel x23 ingots
Silver x16 ingots
Tin x12 ingots
All told, it was easily enough to build dozens of golems, but we only had two cores, so that was the limit for now, so I settled on building two ‘Construction’ class golems. Heph informed me that it would take a few days to finish construction of the golems, move the Genesis Chamber, and get everything built, so I settled in for a sleep, confident in Bob
and the wisps’ abilities to watch over me. I’d wanted to set up the scout to cover the immediate area at least, but after the time I’d spent reviewing the state of the Tower, I just couldn’t justify it. Besides, I still had the Scroll of the Eagle, which I could use to get a good view of the area. It’d be gone once I did, but at least then I could control it.
“Hey, Oracle…” I said, a thought coming to me unbidden. “That essence core thingy I got from the SporeMother, can we use that in place of a Golem Core? Is that what it’s for?”
“No! No, no, no, Jax. An essence core is what it sounds like; it’s the compressed essence of the creature. I know some of the nobles of the empire made a game of collecting them for some reason, but hell no, why would you want to put something like that in a body of stone? All you’d have done is created a stronger version of the SporeMother, with no brain to guide it. It’d be horrible!”
“Ah, righto. I get it, leave the core alone.” I shuddered at the thought and packed it away again before going to sleep. Every day is a school day, I thought to myself.
Chapter Twenty-Two
When I finally awoke the next morning, the golem that had been sent to retrieve the Creation Table from the top of the Tower was approaching, its heavy footfalls echoing in the silent halls. Looking around the room I’d appropriated, I decided to clear the room fully before settling on a location for everything.
The room was square, a single large chamber with two doors, including the entrance. I had designated the second smaller room that led off it as the storeroom and had set Bob to clearing it before moving all our golem materials inside. It was obvious that he’d managed that fairly quickly, and either with Oracle’s direction or his own burgeoning awareness, he’d decided to continue working. He was currently about a third of the way across the main room, stripping out the variety of plant life, fungus, soil and general assortment of hundreds of years of accumulating debris.
I quickly got myself sorted, a drink and a mouthful of hard jerky to keep me going while I joined in to help clearing the room. Once the golem had set the table down, I directed it to dig in, and in short order, the room was, if not livable again at least not the absolute shit tip it’d been before. I’d take that as a win. While we’d been busy, the repair servitor had been completed, and before long, it arrived in our new base of operations. I sent the golem back downstairs and begin clearing out and reinforcing the entrance, making it as safe as possible, while I directed the Servitor class to strip the crap from the great windows on one side of the room.
“Heph, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Jax, I be here.”
“How’s the golem construction coming?”
“It be acceptable, although the additional golems ye requested will require some repairs be made t’ the Genesis Chamber first. Ah’d bet six hours ‘til the second Construction class golem be completed, then two hours t’ move the Chamber t’ yer location. Three hours t’ reassemble and carry out the most basic repairs and we can begin construction o’ the second batch. The Servitor class can continue with the repairs while the Chamber works, so I estimate the third Construction class golem will be ready to be deployed around midday tomorrow.”
“Coolio, and while the Chamber is working, the second golem can be used to excavate and clear the Genesis Cavern out?”
“Genesis Cavern? I like it, aye. The second Construction class unit will return there and begin clearing and repairing ma home…wait…Seneschal is cutting in…”
“Go on, Seneschal, what’s up?”
“I have detected a disturbance on the twenty-sixth floor. Hephaestus confirms that he feels it as well. It began four minutes ago, but appears to be spreading to the entire floor. Inside the area of effect, all our senses are dulled. It appears that there has been no change, but we cannot be sure. As this is also the lower garrison’s main armory, it seems suspicious, so I’d recommend checking it out. In addition, it was the logical place for a last stand for the Tower’s defenders, so there may be more intact cores available there.”
“What the fuck! Wait a minute, what damn armory? Nobody told me about this!”
“It was inaccessible to you until we took the lower floors of the Tower, so I didn’t see any reason to mention it.” Oracle spoke up and I turned to her.
“So there’s an armory on the twenty-sixth floor? How many others are there?” I asked, thinking it was a strange place to locate it.
“There were two others. The one on the ground floor is buried. The roof has collapsed in that section, and, well… it’s not stable. I think we need to avoid it until the area is rebuilt. The other one is at the entrance to the labyrinth, but it looks fairly overgrown.”
“Okay, hold the fuck up. First of all, tell me these things; don’t just make the decision that I don’t need to know, okay? Secondly, what Labyrinth?!” I asked in stunned disbelief.
“It’s standard for each one of the Great Towers to be constructed with a training Labyrinth. Ours had a small watch post set outside the entrance, complete with an armory and medical center . It seems fairly self-evident why?”
“So, there’s a place pretty close that’s teeming with monsters and creatures and traps and shit, and you didn’t think this was important news to mention?”
“Ah! No, Jax, you don’t understand. The SporeMother would never have permitted other creatures this close to her nest. As soon as she cleared out the remaining defenders of the Tower, she would have turned to the labyrinth. The entrance looked like it had collapsed ages ago, so I didn’t think it was important when we were outside earlier….”
“What, so it’ll have just collapsed, and that’s it? End of story?” I said growing more and more annoyed. It felt like every time I sneezed, there was something new going on, and my advisors were keeping it from me…
“Probably. Look, the entrance has collapsed. The buildings that were on either side of it were destroyed at some point shortly after the SporeMother first broke into the grounds. When I asked Seneschal to look it over, it didn’t look like it’d been disturbed in hundreds of years, so I didn’t want to get your hopes up, that’s all. I’m sorry.” Oracle said, her voice close to tears. Sap that I was, I felt my anger dissipating like smoke in the wind.
“Okay, but come on, guys. I’m supposed to be the boss here! Tell me this shit, okay? If I’m doing something wrong or missing something, I need to know!”
“Such as asking questions and no investigatin’ something weird going on in the remainin’ easily accessable armory?”
As soon as Heph interjected, I cursed and grabbed my weapon, directing Bob off up the stairs ahead of me as we set off running. Allowing myself to be distracted so easily and basically doing a ‘Dr Evil’ monologue about being ‘the big cheese’ was not the way to have a good, long, and productive life, I reflected, jumping over a small pile of rubble and running along behind Bob as he pounded up the stairs.
It took what felt like hours, but probably wasn’t more than forty minutes to reach the twenty-fifth level. Bob was waiting for me, as I’d ordered him, with Oracle settled atop his skull. Once I staggered onto the floor, wheezing, I collapsed to one knee and tried to stop my heart from exploding from sheer overwork. I’d literally run miles in full armor with weapons up more than twenty-five flights of stairs. My old trainers in ‘Black Sheep’ would have been proud of me, although knowing them, Lee would have probably beaten Bob here and been doing pushups until I arrived. Crazy bastard. The thought was fleeting, but I found myself strangely missing the days when I trained there, and I felt slightly better about things. I forced myself to my feet and cautiously began to walk across the hallway toward the far stairwell. This floor was one of the ‘room’ layouts, made up of a dozen small rooms on either side of the corridor, with small balconies and benches set out at regular intervals. I concentrated on moving as carefully as I could, casting a spell I’d hardly used since arriving, ‘Chameleon.’ My skin darkened, the oil-like substance flowing over me as I began sneaking
up the stairs. Unlike most of the spells I had, this one was a silent cast, and the change it made in a darkened corridor was considerable. I crept up the stairs until it dissipated, and I crouched down waiting for my mana to refill. Each time it finished, I set off again, sneaking higher and higher until I got a notification.
Congratulations! You have increased your ‘Sneak’ skill by one point. Continue practicing to increase this most useful skill.
I stopped instantly. In the games I’d played, getting a marker like this meant active improvement, and that meant that someone was close enough to see me, but I was preventing it somehow. Oracle had swapped from Bob’s skull to sitting on my shoulder, while Bob waited at the bottom of the stairs. His sneak skills were slightly worse than mine, which is to say he clattered like a shitting dog wearing a necklace of tambourines.
I moved against the nearest wall and crouched down, letting my timer expire, and when nothing happened, I slowly recast it, and inched up further.
I still couldn’t see anything, but I could hear an open window up ahead somewhere. Wind was blowing down the stairs, and it carried some really weird sounds. They were muffled by distance and the shape of the Tower, I was sure, but it still sounded somewhat like arguing voices, as well as an engine humming. It wasn’t as loud as a car close by, but judging from my rough position in the stairwell, I had at least a hundred meters to go before I reached the next floor. For it to be that loud from such a distance…
SLAM! I grunted in pain and shock as something hit me forcefully in the back, throwing me to my knees and driving my face into the wall. I felt as much as heard the crunch of my nose breaking…again… and I felt cold, sharp metal grate against a rib as Oracle dashed from my shoulder, disappearing up into the darkness of the vaulted stairwell.
