Factory Core

by Jared Mandani

  Grakk’n stared coolly at the weird construction, looking at it with an intensely analytical gaze. What if this was some sort of trap? He definitely wouldn’t put it past the cunning dwarves to come up with some sort of treachery like that. He spent some time walking all around the massive shape, staring closely at it and examining it in detail with his black eyes.

  Unlike the average demon warriors, who fought naked and with just their teeth and claws, Grakk’n wore armor and carried a sword, as markers of his position of authority. The armor he wore was only partial armor—a breastplate, greaves on his thighs, shin plates and pauldrons on his shoulders, along with a ragged black loincloth. The armor was shiny and black, like the long, curved sword he wore. Both were made of dragon bones, hardened and blackened in the fiercest fires in the deepest pits of the demons’ infernal realm in the center of the world. Fire-hardened dragon bone like this was incredibly strong; stronger than any steel Men or Dwarves could make.

  Grakk’n drew his blade. He walked cautiously up to the strange machine, and prodded it with his weapon. Nothing happened. He stepped back, and then took a vicious swing at its side with his dragon bone sword. To have done such a thing with a steel sword would have certainly damaged or even snapped the blade, especially with the power with which Grakk’n was able to swing it. But fire-hardened dragon bone was almost indestructible. The blade clanged against the stone, but neither the sword nor the building sustained any damage.

  Grakk’n observed this and simply nodded grimly. He walked around the entirety of the building, staring closely at details that others might have missed; he was not only far stronger than the average demon warrior, he was far more intelligent and observant too. Eventually, he walked back to his band of warriors, who were waiting near the entrance of the building.

  “This thing has been seen moving, hasn’t it?” he growled at one of the warriors, a veteran of one of the skirmishes in which the dwarves had been accompanied by the Factory Core.

  “Yes, me lord,” rasped the warrior. “I seen it, I did, I seen it wi’ me own eyes, me lord.”

  “How does this structure move?”

  “It’s got legs, me lord,” answered the warrior. “Huge steel legs, like a, a giant spider or something, me lord.”

  “So it gets up and walks with these legs?”

  The demon warrior nodded eagerly. “It does, me lord. Like I said, I seen it. I seen it wi’ me own—”

  The warrior’s eager babbling was swiftly cut off by Grakk’n’s fist smashing across his jaw. The warrior went flying through the air and landed in a crumpled heap a few yards away, groaning and dazed from the vicious punch.

  “Just answer my questions with nice, short answers, you stupid fool,” snarled Grakk’n. “Next time, it’ll be my sword splitting your thick skull in two.”

  “Y-, yes me l-, lord,” groaned the demon warrior.

  “Now tell me, you stinking pile of rotting entrails,” growled Grakk’n, “how do the dwarves get this thing to move? I could find no evidence of these so-called spider legs when I examined the building.”

  “I d-, don’t know, me lord,” stammered the demon. “I don’t know how they m-, make it walk. I just seen the legs come out of the sides, I didn’t see the dwarves do nothing to it, it j-, it just seemed to g-, grow the legs out of its sides by itself, me lord.”

  “You’re telling me that this building just moved itself, without the dwarves doing anything to it?”

  “Y-, yes me lord,” answered the demon warrior nervously. “J-, just by itself.”

  “The dwarves played no role at all in making the legs come out of the structure?”

  “N-, no me lord. I saw ‘em. They didn’t do nothin’, me lord. The legs just came out by themselves, and then the whole building s-, stood up, me lord, an’ it walked. By itself, me lord.”

  “I see,” rumbled Grakk’n.

  Without warning, he drew his sword and beheaded the demon warrior. Black blood spurted from the headless body as the creature’s head—with its ugly face now frozen in an expression of surprise and shock—rolled on the rocky ground and came to rest at Grakk’n’s feet. He stared disinterestedly at the skull for a moment and then kicked it away.

  “I have no further use for you,” he growled at the dead body, and then trudged over to the rest of his warriors.

  “We need to take this thing,” he said to them. “It is a powerful weapon, of that I am certain, but I’m not yet sure how it works, or what we can do with it. We need to investigate it further, and figure out how to get it to move.”

  Grakk’n knew that an investigation into the interior of the building would have to be made, but he knew that it would likely be booby-trapped, and he wasn’t stupid enough to go inside himself. Not, at least, until he had sent a few warriors in. Their lives were expendable, and he didn’t care if they lived or died. All he cared about, at this point, was getting this structure to move, and figuring out how to use it as a weapon. And for that, he would need a few guinea pigs.

  He picked five warriors out of the group, and called them over to him.

  “We are ready to serve you, my lord,” they said, all kneeling in front of him.

  “Go into that thing and explore it,” he said. “Don’t break anything. Any warrior who breaks or vandalizes anything in there, I’ll rip your guts out and feed them to you, got it?”

  “Understood, my lord,” they all answered.

  “Good,” he said. “Go inside, make notes of what you see, and when you’ve explored the whole location come back and report your findings to me.”

  “Yes my lord!” they all said.

  With that, they stood up and marched over to the Factory Core. The first demon forced the front doors of the Core open, and they all vanished into the darkness within it. And then, after the last demon was inside, the door slammed shut behind them … and the building seemed to rumble.

  CHAPTER 8

  The five demon warriors stormed into the facility with the fire of aggression in their black eyes. They felt no fear, no wariness as they entered the Core; after all, why should they? It was just a building, wasn’t it?

  The doors of the Core slammed shut behind the five warriors. The rearmost one turned and tried to force the doors open. While it had been easy enough to open them from outside, now that they were inside, the doors wouldn’t budge.

  “We’re locked in,” growled the demon who was trying to force them open. “Won’t move a damn inch.”

  The foremost demon shrugged. “Forget about it,” he rasped. “We’ll smash it open after we’ve explored this place. Come on, Grakk’n ordered us to investigate this place, so let’s do that. You two at the back, you take the left passage. We three will take the right.”

  The small entrance hall had two passageways, one leading off to the left, and the other off to the right. As the foremost demon had suggested, he took two of the demons and headed down the right passage, while the rearmost two demons headed down the left one.

  The three demons who wandered down the right passage found themselves in a hallway with a number of doors leading off it.

  “Try each of the doors,” growled the lead demon. “See if any of them open. I’ll take the right hand side doors. You two try the doors on the left.”

  The other two growled in affirmation, and with that they all set about trying to open the doors. A number of them were locked, it seemed, but after trying half a dozen of them, the first demon finally found one that allowed passage.

  “Oy!” he yelled to his companions. “This one’s open. Come on, let’s see what’s in here.”

  Just as he pushed that door, however, one of the demons on the other side of the hallway found that one of the doors there was open too.

  “This one’s also open!” shouted the demon.

  “Go in and have a look then,” yelled the first one.

  The second demon and his friend nodded and walked through the doorway, while the fi
rst demon entered the door he had opened.

  He found himself in front of a spiral staircase which led upwards. He took a look over his shoulder at the hallway behind him, and then began walking up the stairs. He expected to come out onto another level of the building, but after walking up for a while, it seemed that the spiral staircase was just going on forever.

  Finally he reached the top of it, and found that it led to a dead end. There was no way out, no doors leading anywhere, nothing. Just a solid wall. He grunted with annoyance, and then turned and started to head back down the stairs.

  At that moment, he heard a strange groaning and grinding sound, which sounded as if it was coming from … well, everywhere. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the steps beneath his feet.

  And then, the steps suddenly flattened out. The stairs became a steep, totally flat spiral slope—and jets of oil began spraying out of the walls. The demon’s clawed feet slipped on the oil, and then he fell to the ground with a crash, and started sliding at speed down the winding spiral slope. As he accelerated, he screamed, trying to dig his claws into the stone to stop his rapid descent. But the surface was totally smooth, and he couldn’t get his claws in anywhere. Because of the slippery oil now coating everything, he continued to hurtle down the steep, winding slope at a tremendous speed.

  It was as he rounded a corner that he saw it, and he was sliding so fast that he barely had half a second to scream. In front of him, blocking the spiral, was a wall of, long, razor-sharp silver-coated spikes.

  The demon flew into the wall of spikes, which slammed through his body in well over a dozen places. The force at which he was flying drove the long spikes completely through his limbs and torso. Gasping and twitching, with his black blood spraying all over the floor, and impaled on the three-foot-long silver spikes, he breathed his last breath… and a rumble of what felt like satisfaction vibrated through the Factory Core.

  The next two demons, who had taken the left door, found themselves in a rather different situation. When they walked through their door, they found themselves confronted with yet another choice: they entered a small square room in which there were more doors through which they could pass, one on each of the walls. One demon walked over to the doors and tried them each, one by one, and found that all were unlocked.

  “Which door?” he grunted to his companion. “Left, center, or right?”

  We go … left,” muttered the other one, and he opened the door to the left. He walked through, and his companion followed him.

  As soon as they passed through the doorway, though, the door slammed shut behind them, and try as they may, they couldn’t open it. Once more, they found themselves in a small square room with a door on each of its walls. This time, however, all of the doors were locked except one, so it was through this door that they went.

  Now they found themselves at the head of a long, narrow passage, but this time there was only one door—and it was right at the end of the passage. As the door they had just come through slammed shut behind them, the door at the far end of the long passage opened. They could not see what was through it; there was only an inky blackness, beckoning ominously to them.

  Still, the demons showed no signs of fear; they were, after all, creatures of the darkness, denizens of evil realms, and they did not feel threatened in the least. Not yet, anyway.

  As they were walking along the passage toward the open door, the rear demon noticed that there were long horizontal slits in the walls. Some were at ankle height, some were around waist height, and others around shoulder height. He paused to examine one of them, peering into the dark slit, while his companion went on ahead.

  While peering into the narrow space and trying to discern what was in it, he heard the whistle of what sounded like a huge blade slicing at speed through the air, followed by a surprised shriek of pain from his companion.

  He spun around to see that, somehow, the other demon had been sliced in half at the waist. The demon was now writhing on the floor, its black blood gushing out of its severed waist, howling in shock, while a few yards away its severed legs kicked out a few last kicks as the nerves in them died.

  The demon roared with sudden rage and fright. At that moment, another huge blade, spring-loaded, like the one that had just killed his companion, blasted out of one of the slits in the wall. It moved with such vicious speed that the demon barely had time to react; by the time his brain had sent a signal to his limbs to move, the huge scythe blade had already arced in a vicious circle and taken his head off.

  His severed head, with a look of utter surprise frozen on his lips, bounced a few times on the floor and then came to a rest against one of the walls, while his headless body flopped to the ground.

  Now only two demons remained alive inside the building. However, the Core didn’t intend to allow them to live much longer. Now that it had dealt with three of the invaders, it turned its attention to the final two.

  Before the Core killed these two, though, it needed something from them: their voices. The Core realized that if it simply dispatched them as it had the other three, the demons outside would become suspicious, and wouldn’t enter—which it needed, so that it could eliminate all of them. Yes, it needed the voices of these two, so that it could trick the others into coming in.

  Inside the main manufacturing room, the Factory Core set its machinery into motion, and it began to engrave a number of sentences in the Demonic Script onto a few brass plaques.

  Soon the plaques were ready, and the Core’s plan to draw in the rest of the demons outside was about to be set into motion.

  CHAPTER 9

  The demons who had gone through the left door—when the party of five had first entered the Factory Core—had found themselves wandering down a long passageway with no doors in it. The passage turned after a while at a ninety-degree angle to the right, and then after a while there was another ninety-degree turn to the left. After this, another to the right, and then there was a stairwell leading up.

  They ascended the stairs, and found themselves in another passage. Again they traveled through a number of twists and turns, eventually ending up at another stairwell, but one that went down.

  They followed it, grumbling as they descended the stairs; it seemed like they had been walking forever, and it almost felt as if they were stuck going in circles. This place was becoming a true labyrinth, and although these creatures of darkness feared nothing inside it, they were wary about getting lost in here.

  “It didn’t look so bloody big from the outside,” muttered the first one to his companion.

  “It’s a right maze in here, it is,” grunted the second one. “What are we even looking for anyway?”

  “Grakk’n told us to investigate, you idiot, so that’s what we’re doing, see?”

  “Bah,” muttered the second demon, “investigate what? There’s nothing in here but an endless bloody maze! Let’s just go out and tell him we couldn’t find anything.”

  Just as he said this, they turned another sharp corner; however, this time, they finally stumbled upon a door.

  “See?” said the first one. “There is something to investigate in here. Come on, you ugly fool, let’s check if the secret of how to make this thing stand up and walk is behind this door.”

  He turned the doorknob and found that the door was open.

  “Haha,” he laughed triumphantly. “Come on, let’s see what’s in here. Some dwarven secrets, I’ll bet.”

  He walked through the door, and the other demon followed him. They found themselves in a small square room, with one door in every wall. On each door was a strange brass plaque, upon which script had been engraved in the languages of Dwarves, Elves, Men, Goblins, Trolls, Orcs and Demons.

  While the demons couldn’t decipher any of the other scripts, they could read the basics of their own tongue. The first one wandered up to the door on the right and began to read the script on it.

  “Through this door danger lies,
but the brave adventurer will be rewarded many times.”

  His companion scratched his chin as he thought about this statement. “A lil’ strange, isn’t it?” he said. “Let me read the next one.”

  He walked up to the door in the center, and read the plaque on it. “There is nothing but darkness inside this place,” he read, “as well as monsters who will tear off your face.”

  Both of them had a chuckle at that.

  “Stupid bloody dwarves,” muttered the first demon. “Think they can scare us like that? We are the monsters who tear off faces, ha!”

  He went to read the final plaque on the final door. “Come in, all of you, come in, come in! The secret’s here, we’ve got control, we’ve found out how to move this thing! Come on, all of you, get in here, hurry!”

  The demon scrunched up his face in an expression of quizzical puzzlement. “That one doesn’t rhyme like the others,” he said. “And it doesn’t seem to mean anything either.”

  The Factory Core, however, had just played the two of them. While the demon had read out that last line, the Core had opened a series of trumpet-like pipes, which projected what the demon was reading through the structure, with the sound emerging from the front doors, which now swung open.

  As soon as the demon had read out these lines, though, the Factory Core closed the pipes so that they wouldn’t project any more of what the demon was saying.

  Grakk’n and the other demons outside heard their companion’s voice, and it sounded as if it was coming from just inside the front doors.

  “Did you hear that, my lord?” one demon warrior asked Grakk’n eagerly. “They’ve found the secret to getting this thing moving! We must go in and help them, my lord!”

  Grakk’n wasn’t sure why, but his sixth sense was itching; there was something suspicious about how easily his demon warriors had discovered the secrets of this structure, and it made him uneasy.