Summoned by Monster Girls

Thankfully for our continued survival, the girls snapped out of their surprise quickly. The war-golem had barely managed its lopsided charge for more than ten feet before it was hit with their spells. They correctly identified the stone beast as the most immediate threat.

“Bolt Chain!” The flickering chain built of lightning flicked through the air to latch onto the war-golem between the stumps of its missing legs. The lightning didn’t appear to do much damage to the stone, only blackening it and causing a few minor cracks in the side. I heard Rieka growl in frustration as she pumped more power into the spell.

“Glacial Spike!” Kassandra’s incantation differed from her normal one. I could immediately feel the changed spell as a wave of cold washed through the surrounding air before a tree-trunk sized pillar of ice raced past me to slam into the charging golem. The pillar tapered to a blunt point that was half the size of my fist, but the whole thing was moving fast enough that it crashed home with significant effect.

The war-golem tried to dodge to one side, but because of its past damage and the change to its balance from the missing legs worked together to ensure it only managed to stumble slightly to one side. So the pillar of ice caught it in the shoulder rather than the head.

With a loud boom, the two crashed together. Shards of ice and slivers of stone exploding into the air. The pillar shattered from the force of impact, but it also annihilated the golem’s remaining front shoulder and sent that leg flying so that the creature slammed face-first into the scarred stone floor.

All of this happened in the course of about three seconds. In those three seconds, the mummified ancient humans had made it halfway down the stairs. So I decided it was time for me to add to the chaos. I had a second of indecision while trying to decide which was the greater threat, but the sheer number of the undead and their unsteady movements made my decision for me. The girls had the golem handled at the moment.

A chunk of broken table that was about half the size of one of the plastic totes I used to sling around all the time was my choice of weapon. The stone shifted and flowed as Manipulate Element adjusted it to make it easier for me to get a grip on it using my left hand and the spike that had replaced my right before I hurtled the heavy lump of stone up the stairs with all the strength I had.

The block of stone was heavy. It easily weighed over two hundred pounds, so it was more of a shot-put motion than actually throwing it, but the stone crashed into the three undead that were leading the charge with the same sort of effect that Kassandra’s pillar of ice had on the war-golem. It crushed the chest of one before driving it to one side and smashing another off its feet before tumbling to a stop. This sent more than half of the group falling to the ground in a pile of broken bones and damaged weapons.

A moment later I heard the sharp zot noise as Rieka tossed the other half of her Bolt Chain spell into the golem and completed the circuit. The sound was followed by a loud crack of stone breaking and I glanced over to see that the war-golem’s torso had split between the two points that the electrical chain had connected. The front half still struggled to move forward, rocking back and forth and flailing with its broken limbs, but the back half had collapsed into a pile of rock once more.

“Glacial Earth!”

“Spark Net!”

A combination of ice and lightning washed up the stairs and through the jumbled group of undead. The stone took on an icy sheen, and those undead that were still standing proceeded to stumble and slip before the flashing sphere of lightning burst over them and caused ancient muscles to seize and tear.

I waited until the spells ended before I hurried up the stairs, giving the twitching war-golem space, and began laying about using my shifted right arm. The armored spike made quick work of these creatures. And when the heads were smashed, the bodies stopped moving as the spell damage had already done a good chunk of the work.

Kassandra and Rieka stayed at the bottom of the stairs, covering my back as I ended the remaining undead. Two of them got a chance to lash out at me with their rusted weapons, but they only scratched the carapace shell on my right arm without actually damaging it. With the undead constrained to the stairwell and their already shaky balance ruined, it was relatively easy to end them all.

“Liam?” Rieka’s call drew my attention back down to the base of the stairs. She pointed to the remaining half of the stone golem and quirked an eyebrow. “You think you can finish that off? It’d be a waste to use one of our spells when it’s not really a threat right now.”

“Sure, hang on.” I bent and hoisted up the block of stone that I’d thrown earlier from where it sat on the stairs. Climbing higher, so I was standing right over the still-living war-golem, I hefted the boulder over my head in preparation to end the threat. Dropping a block on it from above felt a bit like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly, but the two hunks of stone crashed together and shattered, leaving only unmoving stone behind.

“Thank you!” Rieka shot me a brilliant smile before wrapping her arms around a shivering Kassandra. Seeing the much smaller woman cling to her friend reminded me of Kassandra’s cold-blooded nature again, and I growled at myself for forgetting.

Of course. That first spell was probably overcharged. If I could feel the cold of that ice, it would have chilled Kassandra. We really need to get her an opportunity to practice more and build her control up. Normal folks wouldn’t have an issue, but she had the misfortune of being cold-blooded while having the gift of ice magic, I thought before I started working my way down the stairs. I’d made it three steps before I stopped in surprise, staring at my feet.

I hadn’t noticed when I climbed up them the first time, but the bodies of the undead were slowly dissolving into powder. The first two I’d killed with the thrown stone were already mostly gone, while the others were rapidly following them in eroding. The process looked an awful lot like a time-lapse of a sand sculpture being eroded by the wind. Within seconds, the living dead were gone, leaving only a mass of grayish sand on the stairs and the rusted remains of their weapons.

“Well, that was creepy as fuck.”

<><><>

Once Kassandra recovered from the chill of having to use the upper levels of her ice magic, a process that she insisted required her to basically unbuckle my armor and crawl inside of it for some cuddles, the girls studied the remains of the golem.

Rieka was excited to find that the glowing ‘eyes’ of the creature had actually been six individual rubies the size of my thumbnail. I helped her extract them as they had been molded into the stone. Kassandra stood watch in case something else emerged from the darkness to harass us. When Rieka had those tucked away in her pouch, Kassandra had me use my Manipulate Element ability to open up the carved head. The impact of the two stones crashing together had cracked the golem’s head already. But, now that it wasn’t moving, I could open it up carefully and properly now. This revealed an intricate runic structure carved inside a hollow of the stone head where a brain would normally be and a small mass of earth mana crystals that would power the construct.

Kassandra quickly sketched out the array to record it while Rieka and I took over guard duty. Once that was done, we finished scouting the room out.

In the rubble under the stairs, we found the ruined remains of another of the war-golems, but it was smashed to pieces already. I extracted its power source as well and passed that to Rieka to store away. We also found three more of the undead that had somehow gotten pinned in the collapse of the upper floor but not destroyed, so I put them out of their misery. The girls watched in awe as the bodies turned to sand and dust after whatever was animating the corpses was destroyed.

“It has to be some kind of magic that kept them intact. The only bodies we’ve found so far were animated. Everything else has eroded from the passage of time. When the body is so damaged that the magic cannot keep it moving, the ravages of time catch up with them.” Rieka’s suggestion sounded as valid as anything else, so we accepted it as the best solution for now before returning to the lobby area.

After a bit of discussion, we decided to just start on the left and work our way around.

Moving to the door that was directly left of the way we had entered, I led the girls over the damaged floor to that side of the room. Scattered about amongst the rubble, I found the shattered remains of several more ancient weapons, but nothing that was actually usable.

We’d made it most of the way to the door before Kassandra pointed out the empty plinth halfway between the left-hand door and the entryway.

“I bet the war-golems were standing on those before whatever happened here got them to activate,” my serpentine lover suggested, and Rieka nodded in agreement.

“That would make sense, to store them out in plain sight like that, especially when they are well constructed. It would be easy to mistake them for statues,” Rieka added her two cents to the pot. The three of us shared a look and a nod that confirmed we would be checking any and all statues from now on.

The space around the left-hand door was actually rather clear once we got within about twenty feet of it. The paired doors bore several long gouges from flying stone but only minor dents. I held up a hand to stop the girls for a moment before opening the door slowly to check what was on the other side.

Another short hallway continued on before turning to the right, so I motioned for them to follow me in.

The floors of the hallway were tiled with the same kind of mosaic composed of small clay tiles as the platform had been. The same winding, spiraling pattern in green and blue marked either side of the hallway and it made me think of a dual-colored, spiraling staircase. I didn’t spend too long on the mosaic as the hallway ended about thirty feet after the right turn before it opened up into an anteroom that was separated by a low wall from an even larger room that was so familiar it was eerie.

Stacks and stacks of metallic ingots, plates, bars, and crates sat in orderly rows in what only could be a single, massive warehouse. It was hundreds of feet across and many times that long, but it did not have the soaring ceiling like I was used to back when I had to put up with Dutcher.

The lights that studded the ceiling and walls illuminated the space and shone off of the ruddy surfaces of the carefully formed metal and the brightly polished floors. As had been the eerie standard since forcing our way past the iron gate in the tunnel, no dust accumulated in this area. The worst that marked the metals was a bit of tarnish here or there, or a slight patina of rust forming on the surfaces of the metal bars.

“Gods above…” Rieka muttered in awe as she peered past the low wall that divided the anteroom from the main warehouse floor. “There has to be enough metal here to supply the kingdom’s smiths for decades.”

“Let’s have a look! If we are lucky, we’ll find some imbued bars buried amongst the stacks. This place has been sealed up for so long that anything that could retain a mana charge should be fully charged!” Kassandra said excitedly and made to push past me and through the roughly ten-foot gap in the low wall.

“Wait.” My single word made the excited dwarf lamia freeze and then turn to pout at me. “Let’s check this area out first. This looks so much like how my old workplace was laid out. I would bet that there is some method of organizing this place.” I pointed to what had originally looked like just a pile of metal and wood in the corner of the anteroom, but after a moment to really study it, I’d recognized the object for what it was.

A desk.

The whole thing had such an eerie resemblance to the old metal desk my third-grade math teacher used that I half expected to find a stack of multiplication worksheets when I pulled open the first drawer. It squealed in protest and the girls winced with Rieka even covering her ears with her hands and smashing the fluffy triangles flat on her skull. Rather than worksheets, though, the drawer contained a dozen or more thin metal plates that had strange runes carved into them that looked familiar, but odd.

The metal plates were as thin as a sheet of paper and made of some kind of hammered bronze. There was a border around the outside of three edges that did not have any symbols, but the partial symbols came right up to the fourth and final side. I laid out several on the desk for the girls to look at while I pulled another drawer open to find it full of the same, but made of wood that dissolved into dust when I touched it.

“These are tally sticks!” Kassandra exclaimed after inspecting one. I must have had a confused look on my face because she elaborated. “Some merchants still use them for some deals, though they usually make them out of wood rather than metal. You write out a contract or an agreement on a strip of the material so that it mostly fills the strip, then split it in half lengthwise. That is proof of the contract and you can then present your half to prove ownership or claim payment.”

Rieka and I gave the serpentine woman a blank look, and she rolled her eyes before adjusting her spectacles while she considered something. That done, Kassandra selected one of the plates and held it up to show us while she explained further.

“Okay, look. A blacksmith might accept an order for, say, one hundred bars of iron at a specific purity and weight for a set amount of coin. The merchant who made the deal would then carve the tally stick and split it. The blacksmith would take the strip and return to his forge to craft the ingots. When finished, he would then present the ingots and his tally strip to the merchant to receive payment and the merchant would match up his stick with the smith’s to confirm the amount due. You couldn’t modify one stick to alter the deal as the other stick wouldn’t be changed to match.”

“Interesting. I must have missed that lecture in the history classes,” Rieka said with a chuckle, glancing back over her shoulder to check the warehouse floor, wary that something else might be creeping up on us.

“It’s not part of the normal curriculum. I told you before, my parents still act as merchants and do trade deals. This is something they taught me from back then. It’s still a practice in use up in the Queendom of Glass Stars and to the west in the Emirates. Mostly for those who work a trade and may not know how to read elaborate contracts,” Kassandra explained with a smile before carefully gathering up the metal strips. She dug out a sheet of parchment from her supplies and made several notes on it with a charcoal stick before folding it around the metal strips. “There, that will help me document where we found these. While it probably won’t help us find anything down here, it might help me figure out what this place was at one time.”

“Fair enough. I think I found a ledger, but it’s ruined,” I said after getting the third and final drawer open on the desk. Inside, I found a stack of parchment that was so faded with age and worn with time that actually opening the drawer caused it to mostly fall apart. There were only a few lines I could make out, and they were fragmented and missing whole portions.

…,095 grams sulfur… west… production ceased

458 glass … … … workshop

… … …—ringes made … tin.

There were entire sections that had simply dissolved on the page. I sighed before carefully sliding the drawer shut once more so it could preserve what was left of the pages until we had something that could do it, too.

“Well, I guess then we need to inspect the warehouse and see what all is in there then, don’t we?” Kassandra said brightly and gestured over her shoulder to the cavernous room. I glanced at Rieka and the wolf-eared woman shrugged. A small smile on her face told me she was excited too.

Moving carefully, the three of us stepped out of the anteroom space and into the main warehouse area. The room was easily two hundred feet across and three or four times longer than that. Stacks of metallic ingots alternated with metal racks holding rods and metal-sided crates full of individual pieces. The girls were intent on quickly cataloging what was here, so we hurried through the stacks and did not stop long to study them as we crept through the empty room.

The same feeling of oppressive weight still hung over us as we moved, which made the echoes of our steps even stranger in the silence as the stacks further distorted the sounds. I was just glad of the crystal lights that hung overhead, as they gave us a decent view of the room. If we’d had to move through here with just our light-stones, it would have had even more of a horror-movie vibe to it.

“I’m astonished at how little corrosion has set in,” I said after the first twenty feet.

We had passed bulk copper storage on our right with iron being on our left. The bars were thinner than I expected. I’d figured that metal ingots would be the loaf-like shapes that one usually saw in movies. But these ingots were maybe eight inches long and two wide, shaped more like a single stick of Kit-Kat candy than anything else. I paused to glance into a copper bucket that was full of what looked like nails before glancing around again. The copper still shone a ruddy orange in color for the most part, with only a patina of the darkening beginning to show that indicated the formation of verdigris. The iron bars showed a faint speckle of rust and even then only the bottom of the waist-high stacks of ingots.

“Same. I have to believe that there is some kind of spell here to keep it at bay. It’s the only reason all of this has lasted as long as it has. The humans have been gone for so long, I would have expected to only find corrosion and dust left behind.” Rieka kept close at my side as she spoke, while Kassandra wound a little ahead of us, pausing to inspect each item for a moment before moving on.

“You would think that there would be some kind of guardian here. This much metal, even without mana infusion, is still worth quite a bit,” Kassandra commented idly and her words made a chill race down my spine.

Checking the surroundings once more, I made sure to pay special attention to the area on the edges of the ceiling, which is where security cameras would have been positioned back at Rykol Foods when I worked there. But there was nothing. The walls weren’t even embellished, unless you counted the occasional scrape and scratch that came from items being dropped against them.

We continued deeper into the room. Kassandra found crates full of ancient glass phials, metallic plates, pipes, bolts, screws, and nuts. Each of the items had the somewhat rough appearance of handmade items, rather than industrial-style mass production, but were still uniform enough that I doubted there would be any issues with compatibility unless they were used for something intricate.

We found sections for copper, bronze, brass, zinc, tin, lead, and iron. There were several sections of metal that I did not recognize: one that had a rainbow shimmer to it but had no mana imbued in it, a whole section of different silvery bars that I didn’t recognize but the girls confirmed were not actually silver so I guessed were some combination of nickel or other standard metals, and a small section that had a bluish tint to the silvery metal.

There was even a section for timber. And, unlike the wood and parchment we’d run into so far, this lumber still looked relatively fresh. It was aged and dry, but the different planks and blocks of wood didn’t have the gray tinge that I associated with years old firewood and weren’t cracking or splitting. I didn’t know how to recognize any of the woods other than pine and redwood based on color, but the girls were happy with the find. Again, the subject of how it survived down here without damage was discussed, but none of us knew what might have allowed it.

None of the stacks or piles were perfect. Every one of them had parts missing or depleted. This told me that this had been an active warehouse at one time, with orders coming in and out. The areas missing supplies were usually the ones closest to the center aisle, but there were occasional spots further back that looked ‘depleted’ as well. I explained it to the girls, and they agreed that this felt more like a regular warehouse rather than a stockpile, as a stockpile would only really have goods coming rather than rotating out, too.

Rieka spotted the heavily armored door in the back corner just as we turned around to head back out of the warehouse.

The door was set flush with the wall and constructed of iron, banded and reinforced with more iron. There was no lock on the door, but it screamed ‘secure’ in its appearance. Crouched on either side of the doorway, tucked away inside recesses in the walls, were a pair of squat forms that reminded me of the dwarves I’d seen in town. But these were heavily armored and bore stone hammers in their hands, which they held in front of their chests.

Kassandra wanted to immediately rush over to check it out, but Rieka and I held her back. There was a bit of an argument over whether we should just throw something at the statues to check and see if they were more golems or not, but it was eventually settled that I would approach to see if they reacted or not, while the girls stayed back to support me at a distance.

The aisle that ran to the door was actually between the section of wood and a section filled with glass bottles and vials. So I had stacks of lumber on my right and crates of glassware on my left as I crept down the forty-odd feet of the aisle.

Roughly ten feet across, the open space I was in was just wide enough that I had space to move and swing in a fight, but not so much that it felt comfortable. The lumber was stacked over my head while the crates only came up to my chest, so I could see over them at least. In all, it was giving me flashbacks to the job I had just recently quit, and that was irritating me.

That irritation vanished when I got within ten feet of the iron door, and the two statues shifted. Their carved eyes flicked open to reveal glowing red gems just like the first golem’s. They shifted to lift their hammers up while they stepped forward out of their recesses in the wall.

Behind me, I heard Kassandra yelp in surprise and Rieka swear before there came the rush of movement over the stone as they hurried to get to me to join in the fight.

“Stop!” I shouted back to them while raising my shifted right arm to menace the statues with the thick, chitinous spike on the end.