B4 Chapter 452: Disassembly, pt. 3
byWhile Ianmus watched on with curiosity, Kaius pawed over the slain remains of a worker drone. They were odd up close. Now that they were no longer charging at him, with their multi-jointed limbs whirling in a violent flail, it was much easier to take in the fine details of their construction.
Whoever had designed these things was either a madman, a genius, or both. They seemingly pulled inspiration from multiple creatures of the natural world, armour construction, and various other disciplines.
Their lack of a head was most striking. It was such a simplistic part of flesh and blood creatures, but its absence was stark — nor did it have any visible ways of detecting the world around it. There were no lenses or mechanical eyes. Instead, the top section of its torso was made of angled, conjoined plating built to deflect blows. Much of its body was like that — some bizarre melding of carapace and heavy plate, layered and overlapping slabs of steel, with tolerances so tight he doubted he could thread a hair between them.
If they were even separate objects. Kaius frowned, drawing his belt knife and picking at a seam between plates.
As sharp and fine as his blade might have been, he could find no purchase. Even a hair-thin gap should have given him some kind of tactile feedback.
It was a solid whole, then.
Strange. He could have sworn that he’d seen several of the worker drones pivoting and shifting through their bodies to leverage greater transfer of weight during their strikes.
Some sort of enchantment, perhaps, that allowed plates to selectively slide over each other or seal tight?
Regardless of how it was done, the default state had to be one of rigidity. As the destruction of the creature’s core had divested it of all mana, any enchantments that had powered the effect had failed.
His eyes drifted down the torso to where it flared out to an octagonal base where its spider-like limbs were attached. There was a hole there — the remaining evidence of where Kenva had shot out this creature’s core.
It provided easy ingress, but at this stage Kaius was interested in how the automata were put together and constructed. He would need to know the makeup of its internals, and how to disassemble them if he wanted to safely evaluate the still-active drones that they’d disabled and were sitting in the corner. There was no point taking the easy way out if it didn’t help him when he most needed it.
Its legs and arms, as varied and unsettlingly monstrous as they were, were of low priority to him. Those he could pick apart at a later date. For now, he wanted access to the thing’s guts. Would they be made of slabs of inscribed steel? Would it be cogs? Would it be a heart of cogs and veins? Alchemical transfusions? He didn’t know, but he was eager to find out.
He did have one advantage. He had one surefire way of getting into the creature’s chest, especially since the durability had no doubt drastically reduced with their deaths.
If his knife wouldn’t work, his sword would.
Kaius rose to his feet, drawing his blade before he held it point level with what would have been the creature’s sternum if it was made of blood and bone.
Ianmus raised his brow. “Quite the precision implement you’ve got there.”
Kaius rolled his eyes. “Not like we have anything better to use at the moment. I suppose there’s Kenva’s knife, but that can wait for more delicate work that requires it. For now, I just want to crack one open. I’m not trying to preserve the internals just yet — just locate where they are.”
“A reasonable approach,” Ianmus replied. “But if that’s the case, why not use one of Porkchop’s kills? He damn near splattered the things. Wouldn’t have much issue investigating their insides.”
Kaius shook his head. “That’s the issue. They’re a little too squished. Things might have moved around. Ideally, even if things get damaged, I still want to be able to tell what they are. Hard to do that if they’ve all been shattered into a thousand fragments.”
Ianmus shrugged. “Well, you’re the closest thing we’ve got to an expert down here. Don’t let me hold you back.”
Kaius smiled and drew his blade high. For all he’d told Ianmus that damage didn’t matter, he still wanted to minimise it, so Mystic Rend would be of no use — far too catastrophic. No, what he needed from his sword was to be tougher and sharper than it already was. His Bladerite would work perfectly, reinforcing the already considerable strength of its enchantments.
Stamina flooded into his blade and the runes on its fuller burned with a powerful radiance.
Kaius brought his blade down. The shrill screech of tearing metal filled the room, drawing a wince from Ianmus. The sound managed to startle Kaius. Shit, he hoped that that hadn’t distracted Porkchop and Kenva from their cycling. With his blade buried a handspan in the drone’s armoured chest, Kaius looked over to see the rest of his team sitting there peacefully, still absorbed in their meditation.
He might have caught the end of one of Porkchop’s ears twitching, but even if he had, clearly the disturbance hadn’t been enough to break his focus.
Satisfied that he could continue, he pulled his sword free with a scrape, aligning it with the bottom edge of the slot he had punched into the steel. A few more times, and he could adjust his angle by 90 degrees.
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Slow going, but if he did it right, he’d be able to cut out a stride-by-stride square from its chest, giving him the access he wanted. Hopefully, if he was lucky, that would be enough for him to identify which structures he would need to avoid in later bisections of the artificial mechanical creatures.
“Are you ready?” he asked, turning to Ianmus as he raised his blade once more.
The mage nodded, hurriedly covering his ears. Another shriek of metal on crystal filled the air.
….
“Come on, you rat bastard,” Kaius muttered, eyes closed as he reached elbow deep into the worker drone’s chest cavity. He’d been digging around in its chest for the better part of half an hour. It was a quagmire of mythical proportions inside the beast — full of artifice, alchemy, and mechanical construction they had no frame of reference for.
“Have you got it yet?” Ianmus asked, hovering over his shoulder as an illuminating ray of light shone from the mage’s finger inside the automaton.
“Not yet,” Kaius grunted, shuffling over to reach a little deeper, even as the jagged edge of that steel carapace dug uncomfortably into his arm.
Much like they’d been warned, the Empire seemed to have been obsessed with anti-tampering methods. Shattering the automaton’s core had caused what looked like almost every runic formation and piece of artifice in its body to overload at once. What might have once been metal plating, levers, gearing, wires, and other bits of construction had been slagged to a semi-homogenous, unrecognisable mess.
Oh, he’d still peck through it, chipping off what he could, but whatever runework might have once existed on or inside these structures had been utterly obliterated. He’d learnt a little, at least. Things got denser the closer you got to the core.
Oddly enough, there seemed to be far less of the various cylinders and inscription plates within towards the top of its body. That, at least, gave him an angle of approach to try with his future attempts. That said, he had spotted something way up by its shoulders only a few minutes prior — a cylinder half the size of his forearm, sprouting what must have been hundreds of tubes and wires. It practically glistened compared to the blackened messes elsewhere in the creature’s body.




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