Keiran

The whole world, at least as far as I’d gotten around to exploring it, consisted of a thousand little villages, most with populations of less than three hundred people. Sometimes they had connections with other nearby villages; usually they didn’t. The places that did have real connections with their neighbors usually had a light density of monsters, or sometimes no real monsters at all.

I took Laphlin to one of those towns, some little place just big enough that no one thought it was odd when a stranger showed up. We teleported onto the side of the road a mile away and I gave him his final instructions.

“Don’t cause problems here. Don’t try to take it over. Don’t try to bully people because you’re better at magic than they are. This is your home now, unless you want to walk somewhere else. It’s far enough away from the tower that you’re never getting back home on your own,” I said.

“So that’s it? I’m… exiled… to this mana-dry dirt clump for the rest of my life?”

“Welcome to how the rest of the world lives,” I told him. “If your tower never existed, it wouldn’t be like this. Even now, that place sucks up practically every drop of mana the world core produces to use for itself, leaving the rest of us with nothing.”

“That’s not my fault,” he protested.

I shrugged. “I’ll be back to check and make sure you’re… adapting to your new life. So be on your best behavior.”

The problem with teleportation was that it took too long to cast, thus making it unsuitable for a dramatic exit. It was hard to have the last word if I had to stand there for several minutes casting the spell, so instead I cast a simple flight spell and shot straight up into the air. The mage I’d stranded in the middle of nowhere scowled up at me, no doubt thinking I couldn’t see him, but then he heaved a great, weary sigh and started trudging to the road.

However he might feel about his new life, he knew what the alternative was. He’d been forced into service, but I wasn’t running a prisoner of war camp. I didn’t have the time or resources to secure enemies I took alive, even if I did have some empathy for his situation. It was an unwinnable game, and I’d given him the best outcome I could afford.

With that done, it was time to decide my next move. Tracking the supply train hadn’t done much good. Not only was it tedious and growing more difficult with every intersection I followed its trail back through, I was almost certain its initial departure point was just one of the villages near the tower that had a teleportation platform in it. The other sites probably got their own individual trains.

The good news was that likely meant there were only the eight facilities I’d already determined the locations of. It made sense for separate supply trains to go to each one since they were all in different directions, and if they had no other stops, there probably weren’t other facilities hidden in the interior of the new Ralvost Empire.

The bad news was that I was making some assumptions to draw that conclusion and had no hard proof. I might very well end up needing to attack a facility to search for more evidence after all. It was too bad real life never left conveniently labeled folders and files on desks in suspiciously unguarded offices. Most of my research time was spent sifting through far too much information, trying to figure out what was actually important and useful. It was a good thing I could cheat with magic to sort through it all faster than a normal person.

Regardless of what I decided to do about the facilities, I’d already found enough of them to make attacking them one at a time a bad idea. Ideally, a simultaneous strike against all eight locations would eliminate them without allowing them to contact each other or the central tower. That plan relied on me being in eight places at once, however, which I couldn’t actually pull off.

That brought me back to the golem I’d stashed in my phantom space. I’d been so busy with everything else I’d discovered that I hadn’t had time to come back to it and figure out a safe way to power it up. Rewriting a golem core was a chore under the best of conditions, and they generally weren’t useful enough to justify the expense, but in this case, it might be exactly what I needed.

I didn’t necessarily want anything complicated, either. If I could sneak them past any defenses in the facilities and position them near whatever Ammun was having built, then all I really needed to build was a shielded golem core set to blow, essentially a bomb with legs. At the right time, they could all charge their targets, detonate their cores, and set Ammun back by months or even years.

There were a lot of flaws in that plan, a million ways things could go wrong, but I couldn’t be everywhere at once. What I could do was mitigate the chances of them being discovered and defeated with a careful selection of spells scribed into their rune scripts. If the one I’d salvaged from beneath Derro was advanced enough, I might be able to slave the other ones I’d build to it and increase the amount of direct control I could exert substantially without wasting six months building infrastructure.

There was no point in speculating on plans any further until I managed to pry open the golem I already had and see what I was working with. The whole plan hinged on it being as advanced as the mysteel pillar it was guarding, or at least somewhere in the same area.

I finished my teleportation spell and started my journey back to my workshop.

* * *

After a full day of tinkering, I was forced to accept that I had no way to crack open this golem while keeping it intact. Sure, I could break it. That was easy. But getting it open without damaging it or the delicate runes inside was a different story. Maybe if I could figure out what this metal actually was, that would help.

I knew that it was two different substances bonded together magically, that one was the base metal—some sort of enhanced, lightweight steel—and that the other was almost like a coating it had been dipped in. I didn’t have the first clue what spells had been required to do this, though it was almost certainly something in the transmutation and alchemy disciplines.

I really didn’t want to break this thing, but I needed access to its golem core to ensure it didn’t try to immediately murder me as soon as I gave it some mana. I’d hoped to gain access through the mana intake on it, but I couldn’t figure out how the mechanism worked. In fact, I was almost certain it was either broken, or it needed some sort of internal input to unlock the channels. If that was the case, I was screwed because there was nothing going on inside that could possibly send that signal.

There was only one thing left to do: crack the golem open and hope I didn’t break anything beyond my ability to fix. I lacked a fully equipped golem lab to enact repairs, not to mention I’d be working on someone else’s designs. Paired with the fact that I’d found it in an incredibly advanced facility, it was entirely likely that it’d be the work of weeks just figuring out how the core worked.

I set up the golem on a table the size of my bed and encased its arms and legs in restraining steel. For the amount of force I was about to bring to bear on its chest cavity, nothing less would suffice.

Then I started casting spells. My first choice was a fine beam that had been superheated to the point where most metals melted when they encountered it. It was a precision spell, one that was generally reliable. If it worked, I’d be able to carve open the golem’s chest plate without doing more than heating up the interior. Hopefully that wouldn’t damage anything.

It didn’t work.

After that, I tried pressurized water, another powerful cutting spell with an equally draining mana cost associated with it. It would soak the interior even as it cut through, but as long as it spent the majority of its force on the chest plate itself, it probably wouldn’t damage the golem core.

That failed, too.

Grumbling to myself, I moved on to my next idea. This one was going to be both messy and expensive. I took a chunk of mysteel and flattened it out into a disk that would fit into the palm of my hand, then sharpened it and gave it teeth like a saw. Working with mysteel using nothing but magic was a giant pain, damn near impossible for anybody else, but since I wasn’t a master blacksmith with a smithy full of enchanted tools, I made do with what I had.

Once my saw was ready, I cast a force spell to press its edge down against the golem’s chest plate and set it to spinning. Mysteel being the hardest thing in the world and resistant to magic, I was confident that I’d crack the golem open this attempt. Hopefully there wasn’t anything important directly behind the outer shell, because I’d be cutting that apart, too.

I couldn’t even see the golem through all the sparks flying everywhere. Despite the saw only being a few inches wide, it was slowly carving a line straight down the center of the golem’s chest, visible only through a divination that filtered out all the light from the sparks. Both edges of the incision absolutely glowed with heat, but the mysteel saw was stronger.

Unfortunately, I’d miscalculated how damn thick the golem’s frame was going to be. Not only was there no interior damage, I hadn’t even cut all the way through it. The saw was going to need a second pass, which would have been a nightmare if it wasn’t being held and spun by magic.

I tapped into the mana being generated by my demesne to keep me going and sent the saw back to the top to try again, this time at half depth. With my actual eyes squeezed closed while I stood with my back to the golem, I watched through my scrying spell, trying to see if I’d made it through so I could adjust the height of the blade.

It took another half an hour and I was pretty sure I nicked at least one important mana channel on the inside of the golem that would require some sort of patch to repair, but in the end I cracked the shell. Even then, the metal was so strong that I couldn’t actually pry the chest plate open, so I ended up cutting it off completely.

I winced and tried to ignore a snapping sound that I was almost certain was a set of overlapping plates that allowed the golem to bend and turn at the waist while I was doing that. If that was the worst of the damage, I’d count myself lucky.

Finally, the chest plate was gone, the metal had cooled, and I got a chance to look at the golem core. I leaned over the table, wanting to see this with my own eyes so I could appreciate the work properly. Even with no mana left, a golem core was still a beautiful piece of work to behold.

Thus, I was quite surprised to find what appeared to be a dead, lifeless human boy, perhaps ten years old, lying inside the golem where its core should be.