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Book 5, Chapter 43
🕑 Added 2024-12-09 12:30:02 +0000 UTCI spent the first week systematically tearing apart the remnants of Ammun’s army. It turned out I’d been a bit too pessimistic in my estimates on how the evacuation would go. By the gestalt’s count and my own estimations, something like seven in ten people had escaped the collapse of the tower, split heavily in the favor of the noncombatants.
The units that attached themselves to civilians were left alone. Usually, they were no more than ten or fifteen mages and casual spying tended to reveal some sort of familiar relationship with the civilians. Instead of wasting my time on them, I focused my efforts on groups that were still following military doctrines and entrenching themselves in fortifications.
The first time I’d attacked Ammun’s army, I’d done my best to conserve mana. That meant limiting myself to advanced-tier or lower spells except in emergencies, which had been fine back when I thought I had more time to whittle down their numbers. Now, I had a very good guess of the amount of time Ammun needed to get back here, and I didn’t need a strong core of loyalists waiting to greet him.
My primary goal was to kill large numbers of mages quickly and without leaving behind bodies that could be reanimated into another zombie army. Fire magic worked great for that, so that was what I used. Guided by the gestalt’s scrying, I visited a dozen groups and incinerated mages by the hundreds. Though I didn’t get an exact count myself, the gestalt assured me that I’d killed a little over two thousand people scattered across eighteen groups in that week.
Those that remained were more of a dilemma. I didn’t want to kill them, but leaving them there was going to cause problems. Some of them would be pressed back into service when Ammun returned. Others would be killed and reanimated. I needed to clear the whole area out if I wasn’t going to be actively contesting Ammun for control of it. To that end, I got a little creative over the second week.
Using the same spell I’d performed to talk to the Global Order all at once, and with the help of the gestalt to forge the connections to the many, many small groups of survivors, I spent my time gathering them together and creating a portal to an island not too far from where I’d dumped Ammun’s diviner corp.
A surprising number of the refugees came in willingly, though an even larger portion were compelled by threats and force. A small faction refused all attempts to coax or browbeat them into cooperating, though usually I managed to get through to them after killing off the stubborn ones. Once they’d all been gathered into groups, a task that didn’t take all that long since they hadn’t had much time to spread out in the first place, I opened the portal and sent them through.
That left nothing but a few isolated deserters, less than a hundred people in total and not worth the mana to teleport around and collect. If Ammun wanted to waste weeks or months chasing them down, that was fine by me. From what I could see through the gestalt’s thousand scrying eyes, none of them were beyond stage three. Nor were they officers or anyone important. Most likely, they were drafted conscripts who’d taken advantage of the chaos of my attacks to escape.
At this point, their fates were their own, and I’d already wasted enough time.
*
There was no particularly good reason to assume Ralvost would be the battlefield, but the giant hole that used to be the tower was still a particularly mana-rich environment. Wanting to take advantage of that, I placed my mysteel generators in the crater. They wouldn’t make much, and certainly not as fast as when they’d been positioned inside intake vents being flooded with heavy mana, but every little bit helped.
I wanted to fix the world core, but I had no problem with harvesting what little mana it still had coming out of it rather than letting it dissipate back into the Astral Realm today. Ideally, I’d have the whole thing set up to cycle right back in, and that was actually a big part of my plan in the coming years, but for now, the more mana I could get my hands on, the better off I’d be.
I trapped Ralvost wherever I thought I might encounter Ammun. The tower was an obvious choice, as were his various facilities and labs that I’d discovered. I doubted he’d need them once he got back, but even a slim chance to catch him without a fight was worth taking. And when I was done in Ralvost, I went back home and did the same thing there.
That took me another week, leaving me with just seven. Other than the fact that I wouldn’t be able to gather enough mana to even attempt advancing to stage nine with my experimental assistance golem core, I actually felt like I’d done a good job of preparing for Ammun’s return. If he showed up tomorrow or in three months, I’d be just as ready for him.
That was what I’d thought, until the gestalt uncovered a new problem.
*
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
‘We are not sure.’
“Because it looks like an army of golems digging themselves out of the rubble,” I said. “But it can’t be that. They would have to have all been destroyed when a hundred thousand tons of rock collapsed on them. Even the ones that weren’t crushed couldn’t possibly dig through a hundred miles of stone in just a few weeks.”
Despite my claims, that was precisely what seemed to have happened. There were already fifty of the damned things standing in the crater. It was impossible. There was just no way. Even with the evidence in front of my eyes, metaphorically speaking, I couldn’t make myself believe it.
“They must be from somewhere else,” I muttered, more to myself than to the gestalt.
‘We have witnessed all of them unearthing themselves from the remains of Ammun’s tower.’
“Teleported in from somewhere else, maybe… Some sort of teleportation beacon buried underground. No, that’s stupid. The beacon would have shattered from such a radical shift in the geography, not to mention the mass displacement required to clear enough space for them to appear would have cost an enormous amount of mana.”
‘Perhaps less focus on the ‘how’ of the problem and more on what you’ll be doing to solve it.’
“Well, they’ve got to go,” I said, gesturing toward the scrying orbs. “The real problem is doing it. One or two would be no problem, but hundreds or even thousands of them?”
‘Do they need to be destroyed?’
“If we don’t want Ammun to have an army of combat golems waiting for him when he returns, I’d say so. I’d hoped with the tower destroyed, all of these golems would become a non-issue. It’s clear that, if nothing else, they need the high amounts of ambient mana in that area to function. Another year or two and they’ll all stop moving on their own.”
But we didn’t have a year. We had maybe six weeks. And while it was certainly possible that I could smash a few thousand golems in that time frame, doing it while maintaining my mana reserves was a significantly more difficult goal. Worse, I didn’t even know if that would accomplish anything useful in the end. Without knowing where the damn things were coming from—because it absolutely could not be that they’d dug themselves up through a hundred miles of stone—I had no guarantee that more wouldn’t show up to replace whatever I destroyed.
Maybe I didn’t need to destroy them. I’d displaced the human population. Could I do the same to the golems? There was plenty of ocean to dump them into, far enough away that even if they survived the crushing pressure of the depths and started walking back to Ralvost somehow, it would take years to return. Or I could widen the channels letting the ocean pour into the massive pit and finish flooding it.
I couldn’t teleport them all individually, and opening up a massive miles-wide portal under their feet to swallow them was just as infeasible, but maybe I could bait them in. They hadn’t shown any sort of intelligence when I was fighting them back in the tower. A big magic hole in the air with me standing in plain view on the other side and some force spells to shove them through might actually do the trick.
If I was going to maintain it for hours or days, I needed a permanent framework, however. That would take a bit of time to put together, but I could do it. I was more concerned about the golems’ sensory runes. If they couldn’t ‘see’ through the portal, it was going to be a lot harder to stand there as bait. It might be worth it to capture one and give it a thorough examination before I wasted too much time and effort on this plan.
“I think you might be right,” I said after giving my plan a few more moments of thought. “Destroying them all is impractical. Relocating them is much easier, as long as we pick a place Ammun won’t be able to easily retrieve them from. I’m going to go grab one so I can take it apart and poke at its core. I need to know what kind of guidance runes these things are working with so I can properly bait the trap.”
‘Do you require any further assistance from us?’ the gestalt asked.
“Not regarding this. For now, we’re just kind of holding. Keep an eye on everything, and let me know the instant something goes wrong.”
‘Very well. And the matter of our payment?’
“Coming along, but it’s a slow process. Depending how long it takes me to engineer a solution to this whole mess, I should have the prototype done by the end of the week.”
‘That is good. We are pleased with your progress.’
I did my best to keep from rolling my eyes. If the gestalt didn’t have a perfect memory, I’d have said they’d forgotten who was the stronger one in our relationship. But, as arrogant the entity might be, they were rapidly becoming my most useful ally. I could appease them for a few more months until this business with Ammun was settled. Then I’d settle up accounts and hopefully wouldn’t be relying so much on the gestalt’s services.
Querit was never this much of a pain to work with. He offered smart ideas and contributed readily without trying to extract concessions from me. When I stopped to think about it, I was actually starting to miss working with him. Hopefully he’d get over whatever his issues were soon.
Maybe I would check in with him soon. Ammun’s descent on Manoch affected him, too. If nothing else, self-preservation might motivate him to look past his issues with me. He could have handled stuff like dissecting a golem core for me, or continuing the research on creating mysteel. That was important.
“I’ll let you know when the first version is ready for testing,” I said. “For now, I’ve got some other work to take care of.”
‘The golem problem?’
I studied the image of the golems crawling out of the rubble. Even as I watched, a new hand busted free and started dragging a metal body out into the sunlight. “Exactly. Right now, it’s nothing. But if Ammun can take direct control of them, he still has an army to wield. I need to get rid of them and wipe out any trace of where they went so that he can’t retrieve them.”
With a final word of farewell, I teleported to the first point in the chain between Eyrie Peak of the former Sanctum of Light. Two more jumps saw me to my destination, where I found an isolated golem and promptly smashed it apart.
“Too much force,” I muttered to myself as I looked at the partially destroyed golem core I’d pried out of its chest. With a sigh, I tossed it aside and scanned for another golem. There was one a few hundred feet away, part of a group of three. That’d do.
