Despite the size of the limb, the creature moved with startling speed. I had barely enough time to acknowledge the attack before it was nearly to me. Thankfully, my training from Cerebaton kicked in.
All four legs pumped to throw me backwards away from the swing, and I felt the breeze as the hunk of stone passed only inches from my head. As I sailed backwards, the two arms equipped with dactyl clubs fired off, slamming the hardened chitin spheres into the stone fist. Since I was mid-air when it happened, this did more to shove me backwards than damage the target, but that didn’t matter as much.
My girls reacted as I expected them to. They immediately fanned out by the doorway and began pumping spells into the shifting mass of rock even as I landed on the ground in a scrabble of claws.
“Golem!” Rieka cried before lashing another crackling chain of lightning through the air. “Big one too!”
“Keep hammering it!” I barked back even as I charged.
Adrenaline surged through my body as I lashed out with the stinger-arms. They did little damage, only leaving white scars on the stone limb, but every bit would help as I studied my target as the stone limb swung back towards me.
Skipping to one side, I let the head-sized fist slam into the ground with a rumble that dislodged an avalanche of pebbles from the slope and made the roof groan ominously.
“Shit!” Rieka swore, before sending another bolt of lightning into the creature.
The bright flash of light illuminated the rubble enough that I could finally pick out the golem’s body amongst the broken stones, and what that revealed was both worrying and relieving.
It was hard to tell just how large the creature was, given that it was buried to the waist in the fallen ceiling. However, its arm was easily four feet long and sturdy, ending in a watermelon-shaped fist studded with iron spikes. The golem’s head was a rounded sphere of stone with a trio of glowing gemstones set into the front, one each of blue, purple, and green. The head sat on top of a cracked and damaged torso that looked like it had been carved to resemble a knight in thick plate armor. The other arm of the golem was broken barely a foot from the shoulder, though that did not stop it from using the damaged limb to try and drag itself free of the rubble.
Planting all four feet, I lunged forward and slammed a one-two punch with both of the dactyl clubs into the head, rocking it to one side and sending a chunk of rock shearing off and spinning away. But the golem barely reacted, swinging again with its massive fist to bat me away.
Ducking down, I let my lower half flow away and extend into a serpentine tail. Despite the teasing talk with Kassandra, I had actually practiced some with the body and while I couldn’t produce a large tail at this time, it was enough to scoot me out of the way.
I heard Shayla shout something before a scintillating beam of condensed light hammered into the stone limb just above my head, making a large chunk of it glow first red then white hot, but not melt.
“Kass! Hit the heated spot!” I barked, slamming both of the stinger-tail arms into the ground to anchor myself and change my course.
Kassandra was already on it, my clever lamia seeing the opportunity for what it was. While I’d practiced with my own magics and abilities, my girls were training themselves and going through what equated to college-level classes for their magic.
The spell my brilliant redhead conjured was a sphere of ice roughly the size of my torso. As it slammed into the glowing spot high on the biceps of the golem, the shell cracked and sent icy water flowing over the superheated stone and producing a hissing cloud of steam.
I heard the crack of stone breaking through the cloud and used that sound to target my next one-two punch. The surface of my dactyl clubs surged and prickled with the same abrasive nodules that had let me finally get traction on Gyrallia’s slick carapace, and the dual blow into the thermo-shocked stone completed the process in shearing off the limb.
The hot steam engulfed me, but my Shape-Shifting
Shaking my head instinctively to shed any condensation, I forced the scales back from my eyes to survey the damage as a good three-fourths of the golem’s sole arm landed on the ground with a crash.
My instincts screamed and I pushed off, the tail shifting once more into legs to propel me forward in a leaping roll that was thrown slightly off-balance because of the change in distribution of my weight. A moment later, the stump of the arm lashed through the air as the golem tried to attack me once more.
The loss of the limb, something that would have sent most normal creatures into shock, was nothing to the golem.
“Keep hammering it,” I shouted even as Jane sent a barrage of wind blades into the cloud of steam, dispersing it and exposing the golem’s head.
“Again?” Shayla asked in between the sharp of Rieka’s spells hitting the golem’s head.
“On you!” Kassandra snarled, her spell rod dancing through the air as she focused and drew magic together for another of her spells.
“Aim for the head!” Rieka ordered, sending the other half of her familiar spell through the air to complete the circuit and leave a scorched point on the top of the golem’s head.
With it unable to reach any of us now, the golem focused on trying to pull itself free of the wreckage, causing more rubble to shift and the ceiling to give a worrying .
“I’ll keep it distracted,” I barked, my lower body melting into the quadruped form once more before I threw myself forward.
The stumpy limbs could easily break bones if they connected, but their shorter reach meant that it was far easier to dodge in and out, jinking to avoid the slapping blows. I had to stay close enough that the golem could ‘reach’ me, otherwise it would try and pull itself free. Which I was sure would bring the ceiling down on us in short order.
In the handful of seconds it took the girls to prepare their next round of spells, I had to dodge three separate swings. But when I heard Shayla’s voice rise into a wordless shout of power, I dropped low to the ground to ensure that I was not in the way of the attack.
Another brilliant beam of light slammed into the golem’s head, superheating the stone until it glowed before another orb of half-frozen water slammed into it, scattering hissing steam in all directions.
This time, Rieka and Jane were ready as well, unloading a bolt of lightning and a broad strip of rippling air that shredded the burning steam in their wake.
A dull echoed in the wake of the spells, but the golem kept flailing about. A large crack showed in its oddly-shaped head, but the creature remained moving.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Acting on a hunch, I pushed my Manipulate Element
Forcing the mana into the creature, I clawed away at the innards of it, trying to force the split open wider. The golem seized, its own magical power fighting against me but arresting its movement for the moment.
Jane was the first one to capitalize on the golem holding still, an arc of wind zipping over me and slamming directly into the crack on the golem’s head. The fissure gave another loud before splitting wider.
A half-second later, another beam of light smashed into the head of the golem. The rapid heating, cooling, and then heating again of the stone finally was more than it could handle.
The loud of the stone splitting echoed in the room, just barely audible over the sound of the stones shifting. But the golem slumped down once more with a crash, limbs splaying out around it as the magic animating the stone construct flowed out into the air.
“Shit,” I panted, releasing my hold on the Manipulate Element
Movement out of the corner of my eye drew my attention to the door and I immediately held out a hand to stop the girls as they started toward me.
“No! Stay back until I know it’s safe.”
As if to punctuate my statement, the rubble shifted and groaned. Kassandra, who had been leading the ladies’ charge came to a stop and she began to reverse on her coils.
Using Manipulate Element
During that time, I was able to confirm that the golem had been running in a sort of ‘low power’ mode to conserve its remaining mana. There was a small cluster of earth-aligned mana crystals inside a hollow in the golem’s chest, which I was able to recover via a small hatch in its back. But other than the mana crystals and the trio of gems in its ‘face,’ there wasn’t anything else of value on the golem.
When it was safe, I beckoned the girls forward. Kassandra led the charge, thumping into my chest and wrapping her arms around me in a tight hug with the others only seconds behind.
“Come on, girls,” I said, faking a groan as they all tried to hug the life out of me. “We aren’t done here yet.”
“Fine,” Rieka growled, pulling back to mock-glare up at me. “But you would tell us if you were actually hurt, right?”
“Of course I would,” I countered with a frown. “Hiding injuries would only endanger you girls more. Sure, I like being tough, but I’m not dumb.”
“Good,” Rieka said with finality before poking the tip of my nose with one finger. “Behave properly and I can guarantee you a reward later.”
I had to fight the urge to bite that finger playfully, since I’d just made a point of the fact that we needed to focus. Instead, I just nodded in understanding and the girls released me.
“Okay, so that was mildly terrifying,” Kassandra said, turning a thoughtful look towards the golem. “What do you think? Any more of those in here?”
“Doubtful,” Jane answered almost immediately.
“What makes you say that?” I asked her while trying to pick up the power conduit under the floor once more with Manipulate Element
“If there were more of the golems, I guarantee we’d have seen them out in the hallway leading up here. There is no way they wouldn’t have been caught up in that fight. Maybe there are more under the rubble or behind it, but I don’t think there are more just hanging around, unless there’s another trapped one.” Jane gestured wildly while she spoke, her tail dancing like a little flag over her head.
“That… makes sense actually. Be wary of any more rubble piles I guess?” Rieka said, blinking slowly before she shrugged.
“Can do,” I confirmed. “Come on, through this way.”
The door set into the right-hand wall was where the precious-metal conduit ran, still humming with power. I spare a moment to think about digging it up, since it was made mostly of copper and silver, though that felt a bit too much like I’d be tapping into my ‘interdimensional hobo’ side by tearing up conduit like that.
The door opened up into another rubble-strewn room, but this one seemed to have weathered the fight better than the others. Broken desks, shattered metal equipment, and ancient bones littered the room, which I swept aside as I guided the girls in.
We navigated through a number of different rooms, most of them had the feel of either labs or record areas based on the detritus that remained behind. The girls checked everything, and I could tell that they were hoping for another possible big payday if we could find the supply-room.
The conduit led us past several rooms that the girls glanced into to check and make sure nothing was lingering, but they were just the more mundane sort of supplies like crates of vials full of dried ink, metal tools, and buckets of nails fused together by rust.
All except the second to last door, that is.
While I had been using pulses of my Manipulate ElementMana Reservoir
I felt the moment my last point of internal mana was spent and my body started to siphon from the crystal. The switch over was a little jarring, but in the moments between my own mana pool and the crystal in my hand, I felt something twinge at the edges of my senses.
It was very faint, but since my inner reserve was empty it made me far more sensitive to the external mana, and I felt something else affecting the mana current, something besides the conduit under our feet.
The sensation came from a wall just ahead of us, and I angled towards it while the girls followed in my wake. The darkness and somber confines kept casual conversation to nothing, so we moved in utter silence.
Another pulse of mana out to map the ground told me that nothing was nearby. No sensations of movement or anything else. If anything, that made me more nervous. The wall felt just like any other wall, but after pushing through it with my Manipulate Element
Spreading my mana out over it, I pressed and pulled at the wall, testing it for anything that might make it move or shift. Within moments, I found the catch concealed under a brick and triggered it to make the door swing inwards, revealing another pitch-black room.
The silence hung even heavier in the air, but I pushed it aside for now as Shayla moved her light spell closer for me without asking.
As light filled the room, it revealed several things to me. The first was a massive table of black stone set in the middle of the room. A massive table with telltale grooves and funnels cut into its surface that could only be one thing, as I’d seen something similar in the Shadow Mountain facility.
An operating table.
At the foot of the slightly angled table was a grate that vanished into darkness, which I could only assume was for disposing of whatever blood or liquid flowed off the table. Fittings and holes in the stone showed where there would have been restraints to hold something in place, and my brain immediately supplied me with images of people strapped to the table. After all, why would you hide something like this if it wasn’t for illicit use.
The light continued to fill the room, revealing a line of three cages against one wall. All of the cages were made of odd gray metal that hadn’t succumbed to the corrosion of time in this place, despite the damp air coming from the drain. Each cage sat empty with its door sitting open. Except for the last cage in the corner of the room.
Huddled in that cage was a mummified form of some humanoid creature. It was hard to tell from this distance, but I could make out a pair of folded legs clutched to a thin chest while skeletal arms wrapped around them. Faint scraps of flesh still clung to those bones, the last remnants of the body that once controlled the skeleton.
But by far what was more eerie than the body, were the scratches and scrapes dug into the wall and floor next to the cage. As if whoever the corpse had been had tried to claw their way through the wall or floor, in some desperate attempt to escape the fate that awaited them.
“Gods above,” I heard Shayla swear as we crept into the room.
Something was drawing me closer to the corpse. Despite the fact that it human, I felt a need to inspect it.
So I moved carefully over the floor, past a rusted iron tray holding a number of ancient instruments made of the same gray metal as the cage, somehow resistant to the passage of time that ravaged everything else in this place including the tray.
Stopping in front of the cage, I squatted down to look at the mummified body that lay within. It was impossible for me to tell whether it had been a man or a woman, I didn’t know enough about anatomy to tell from just a skeleton. But something in its bearing told me that it had been a female, whatever it was.
The skull sat on one side, as if the owner of the body had fallen asleep using her arms on her knees as a pillow with her face aimed at the wall. And as I leaned closer to look at the skull, trying to find out what it was that drew me to this body, I finally recognized the tugging, stirring sensation I felt in the mana around the cage. If it wasn’t for the fact that I could manipulate entropic energy, I wouldn’t have recognized it either.
But I felt it, just the faintest touch of entropic magic nestled within the corpse that felt almost exactly like the crystallized earth mana in my left hand.
A chill gripped my guts as I shifted to look closer at the skull. A skull with far too many eye sockets for anything native to this world.
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