B4 Chapter 455: Disassembly, Finale

Kaius laid his hand flat on the slab of steel which had sealed them into the barracks that had been their home for several weeks now. Feeling the cool touch of the metal on his skin, he held his mana primed and ready, but did not inject it into the structure just yet.

In some senses he found it funny that they had been imprisoned so quickly upon their return to Deadacre, yet the differences between this and their treatment at the hands of Old Yon and his men were incomparable.

In reality, he found it hard to even consider their time in the barracks as confinement. For one, he was more than confident that they would have been able to blast their way out almost immediately.

Between him and Ianmus, they had a truly scary amount of firepower to call upon, and he refused to believe that the barricades that sealed them in were designed to contain mages of their strength. Even if they had been, they had Porkchop’s raw physicality.

No, they had stayed put because it benefited them. It gave them the time and freedom he needed to pursue an understanding of Imperial runic construction. That, and it was perhaps wise to try and avoid setting off every alarm in the damn ruin — for a second time.

Mapping out the structures of the worker drones had been an immensely frustrating, gruelling endeavour, but he had done it to some degree at least. Inevitably, the grapple of wills between him and the automata over the mana within them led to an overload of their circuits, but he had learnt what he could and seen the Imperial runes in action.

They were still utterly foreign to him, but he had made notes. There was a wealth of knowledge there, one he intended to share once he found a runewright of sufficient skill, ability, and moral fibre.

As much as it pained him to acknowledge his own failings, he did have to admit that at his core he was a warrior and not a scholar. He could appreciate the artistry and technical mastery of the Imperial script, but he did not have the skills or experience to decode it for himself, let alone synthesise that understanding into creating the complex pieces of artifice it was capable of.

Yet for all he lacked, there were some things he had gleaned: how the artifice was structured, how connections were formed and linked, how power flowed through them. He felt it with his own touch and mana, and he had seen it with his own eyes.

The simple reality was that breaking things was much easier than creating them.

The door under his hand was simplistic, rugged — a slab of steel absent of adornment or engraving. Whoever had made it had had one purpose in mind: a perfect barrier.

Kaius would see that purity of purpose broken. Mustering his will, he pushed his mana out of his palm and into the alchemically infused steel.

There was an attempt at rebuttal as the enhanced material resisted his influence, but his will was iron, and he made contact with the circuits within. They were charged, a flow of mana connecting them to the wider facility. That was fine. He didn’t need to serve as a power source for the runes themselves to map them out.

Following the ley lines through the metal, Kaius gingerly sketched out a picture of it in his mind. An internal web connected to the greater whole at the upper right corner and middle of the left side — an outbound and an inbound connection. They were similar to, if far simpler, the ones he had observed in the vault door at the start of the Imperial bunker.

There had been an array, small and tightly packed, that had been shattered in the entryway. If he had to guess, whatever the artifice did, that was what fed signals to the wider facility — the most important thing for them to destroy, so their escape would not set off an alarm.

Kaius drew his mana back slowly, careful not to disrupt the door’s artifice, before he opened his eyes. They were ready.

Jogging back to the workshop where they had made camp, Kaius found his team lounging on the spread-out carpets. As he entered, they looked up, eager expressions on their faces.

“How did it go? Did you find what you were looking for? I’m more than ready to get out of this place,” Kenva said, keeping her hands busy by twirling a copper coin through her fingers.

Kaius only grinned as he leaned back against the wall behind him. “I did. There’s a section of its formation we’ll want to sever before we break our way out.”

Porkchop slumped to the ground. “Oh, thank the Matriarchs. I’ve been going mad. There’s nothing here but tools, rotted beds, and old bones. It’s so boring. I thought you guys said these places were supposed to be full of loot.”

That was true, Kaius thought. Well, he wasn’t exactly an expert, but he did know the freshly uncovered Imperial ruins had a tendency to draw Silvers by the dozen. The riches that could be found within were too large of a temptor. Even if functioning artefacts were rare, those that were found were often priceless.

“They are, in a sense,” Ianmus replied, starting to store away their spread out belongings in his storage ring.

Kaius frowned, though he moved to do the same. “We haven’t seen too much evidence of that.”

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He was, of course, discounting the simple value of the knowledge they had pulled from the wreckage of the automata.

“From what I’ve heard and seen in the archives, most facilities found aren’t quite as active as this — not even close. In most cases, the vast majority of wealth pulled from Imperial ruins is in raw materials.”

Ianmus nodded towards the metal workbenches and framed shells around them.

“Scrap metal?” Kenva asked in disbelief. “Silvers are plundering these places for scrap?”

Kaius blinked as Ianmus nodded, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

“Of course they are,” he said. “Every bit of it is alchemically treated. Hells, it looks like it was forged yesterday despite being millennia old. Think about how long and how many resources it would take an alchemist and metallurgist to make something like that. Even if it’s not a unique material, it’s still worth its weight in gold, and there’s so much of it.”