B4 Chapter 453: Disassembly, pt. 4

“Gods’ damn bastard of an artifact!” Kaius said, setting the cylinder down on the ground. He hurriedly drew a rag from his storage ring and wiped off a plastered layer of viscous oil that had covered his hands.

“Shattered axles. You’d think the damn thing cut your purse.” Kenva teased, a hint of a smile crossing her mouth, though she wasn’t watching his work too closely. She was far more diligently focused on the collection of de-limbed, functional worker automata that they had stacked in the corner — who themselves waggled the stumps of metal limbs in useless fury.

Kaius shot the ranger a scowl, not deigning to answer, before he refocused on the sprawled collection of metal segments that lined the ground in front of him.

Dismantling the cylinder had been delicate, frustrating work that had taken hours. He still hadn’t even the faintest clue what it could possibly be for — only that it was made up of twelve different layers, the inner two-thirds of them separated by thick layers of grease that seemed to have a mind of its own.

The sensation of it on his hands was hair-raising — simultaneously oily and tacky. He’d had to resort to using raw alchemists’ spirit to scrub it free from the plates.

All that work, and only for a questionable gain.

First, he’d hoped the damage he’d seen on the outer layers wouldn’t be as total further into the device. Yet to his displeasure, the damage had almost always been total. Half of the time he’d spent dismantling, he’d been identifying small segments where he thought there might have been lesser damage. It was hard to tell — the runes the Empire had scrawled had been inlaid with a substance almost identical to the surrounding metal. More than that, they were vanishingly small. Those two facts combined meant a proper inspection all but required Truesight.

He consigned himself early to the fact that he wouldn’t be able to make much progress until he fully dismantled and cleaned the thing. Leaning so deep into his ocular skill would be draining, requiring much of his focus and will.

Far easier to do it when he could flick between pieces of scrap without having to stop every few minutes to gather more.

Kaius breathed slowly and reached for the first piece — a curved section of metal almost as long as his finger.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Ianmus said, still perched close by, his eyes bright with naked fascination. Kaius nodded to his friend with a thankful smile before he dove in.

Throwing his will and Authority behind his Truesight, Kaius’s eyes sharpened. Motes of dust spun through the air, yawning in his vision — each one visible, from the jagged fragments that had worn off the hard stone walls to the softer structures that had come from fabric that had decayed over millennia.

He pushed the sudden distraction from his mind, focusing on the metal in his hands, every pore and bump revealed to him.

Minute differences in colour grew distinct, like the runic inlay had been replaced with a material of the most vibrant red.

Kaius frowned. The array inscribed on the metal was warped to the point of indecipherability. More than that, it was hazy — almost like he was looking at it under water. That was impossible. Sure, there’d been a little singeing that he’d been able to tell, but nothing that could have caused such total damage, while perfectly melting the inlay so that it melded with the surrounding metal.

He didn’t understand — something was off. Most people wouldn’t be able to recognise it, but he had dealt with runework far more complex than this. As dense and tightly scrawled as the Empire’s work may have been, it was hard to defeat the complexity of his glyphs.

Even with sudden and total destabilisation, some sections would have to be left relatively untouched. More than that, it didn’t make sense for damage so complete as to utterly warp each individual rune — ones where each individual line was as thin as a hair, at that. Something should have survived, even if only a single example.

That wasn’t all. With such total damage, there should have been obvious signs. He would have expected some scorching on the surrounding metal plating at the very least, yet there was none!

Hells, he couldn’t even work out what was simple runic geometry and what were lines of individual characters.

It was like the whole thing had been smeared.

Obfuscation. It had to be. One potent enough that even Truesight backed by his monstrous mental stats nearly missed it.

Kaius frowned, resting his hand on his chin as he mulled over the mystery in front of him.

Whatever was warping his senses had to be runic in nature — yet that in and of itself screamed a mastery of the art that was divergent from his own. The effects… He couldn’t even imagine how he would create such an effect strong enough that it would work on him. Especially not with a formation dismantled and lying in segments that were cut off from its power source. Still, if it was runic, it would need power from somewhere. The only thing he could imagine was that it was somehow feeding off the ambient mana in the air — even if he could see no flow of the energy with his mana sight.

“Ianmus, can you use your manipulation to pull the mana away from this plate?”

The mage would be far better at such a task than he. Their mana manipulation skills had almost opposite specialities — Ianmus was utterly focused on manipulating mana external to himself.

The mage gave him a curious look. “I mean, I could. Not completely, of course. I don’t think it’s even possible to create a mana vacuum. But I can absolutely significantly lower the concentration. Why?”

Kaius nodded. “That should be enough. I think there’s some sort of obfuscation effect preventing me from inspecting the runework. Considering it’s inside an automaton, reducing the surrounding mana should decrease the intensity of the effect. I’m confident I’ll be able to break through it with Truesight after that.”

Ianmus looked at him in surprise, flicking to the shard he’d been examining a few times. “It’s a strong enough effect that you can’t punch through it already?”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Kaius winced. “Unfortunately, yes. The scale of it is minuscule. The structures I’m seeing look like they could be inscribed on a pinhead, almost. It wouldn’t take much to smudge such inscriptions to the point of being utterly unrecognisable.”

Kaius shook his head. “Honestly, the fact that they used runework to such a fine degree is a miracle in and of itself. I’m not even sure if I have the dexterity to manage such a thing — not by physically inscribing like this, at least.”

“Remarkable,” Ianmus replied. “Regardless, whenever you’re ready.”

Kaius nodded, where he picked up the curved metal fragment once more. “Now,” he said, throwing the full weight of his being behind Truesight.

As Ianmus frowned in concentration, mana swirled around the fragment — pushed out in streams until there was a strangely vacant bubble surrounding Kaius’s hands. The lack of mana against his skin made him feel naked, an absence he only recognised then — like the weight of a blanket that had been on him for so long it had been forgotten about until removed. The hairs on the backs of his palms rose, but Kaius pushed the sensation out of mind.

As the mana vanished, he leveraged every scrap of Authority and intent that he had, forcing Truesight to peel away the falsity that he knew lay before him. At first, the thin web of lines on the metal plate stayed smudged. He wasn’t disheartened. Any moment now —

The obfuscation failed at the same moment he heard a chime from the system.

**Ding! Truesight has reached Level 201!**

Clarity came like the frigid touch of a polar wind — sudden and sharp. Smudges resolved into slashing, jagged lines in an endless litany of fine runes. Kaius gasped. What he had initially assumed was runework curving its way over the plate was, in actuality, a tessellated pattern of sacred geometry alone.

There were still traditional runes, lying underneath it — but the geometric formation atop them was distinct. It’s its own entity. He didn’t even know what to call it.

To non-practitioners, they might as well be one and the same. He’d long assumed that sacred geometry was basal. Vital, but incapable of producing magic without runes to guide, shape, and drive a process. Just like how a mathematician couldn’t build a cathedral with equations alone.

Ianmus had proved that wrong with his keyseal, and now again he was shown how shallow his understanding of magic was.

There was no equal to it in his glyphs or any of the traditional runework he had learnt. Sacred geometry, used in the manner of a traditional runic enchantment.

The only purpose he could think of for the inscription was that it must have been the source of the obfuscation effect — but that was madness. People didn’t make use of sacred geometry alone for a reason; it was far more unstable. Hells, even Ianmus’s key seals required his intent, will, and a binding to his person.

Anything connected to the array would have been ruined — decayed as the inherent instability wore away at connected structures.

He paused, placing the strange geometric array out of mind to focus on the other inscriptions that had been revealed. Fine runes covered every scrap of available surface between the geometric array. Were his suspicions right?