B4 Chapter 456: Reactor, pt. 1

Scintillating and tightly controlled, mana wormed through his flesh.

Kaius was focused and driven — finding a window of quiet between patrols where they could duck into a side room and he could reinscribe was difficult. He couldn’t waste this opportunity.

His last Stormlash was all he would need. Since their flight from the redoubt he had shifted his loadout to favour the spell. They were devastatingly effective against the mechanical automata with their metal bodies. The fact that he was so familiar with the spell and it was by far his fastest spell to reinscribe was only another benefit.

They had been at it for hours, racing through halls, avoiding as much battle as they could, and taking every opportunity to keep themselves recovered and topped up as they spent their stock of potions like water. It was frustrating — he was by far the limiting factor of their pace.

The others only had to contend with recovering their resource pools. He was not so lucky. Every stop and moment of rest, he had to put them at risk as he drew his focus inward to squeeze in as many inscriptions as he could.

At the very least, he was almost certain that Kenva’s hypothesis was correct. For all that the automata threw themselves at them with beautiful displays of coordination, they were not actively tracking them through the facility. The sensors were sharp, and when one group spotted them, they all reacted — but they had a greater beast and a ranger with a Heroic class on their side. Kenva and Porkchop’s senses were sharp enough to hear the rattle of the scrambling automata long before they themselves were detected.

Still, they couldn’t avoid every fight. Worker drones had fallen like waves before their advance, and their intermittent run-ins with Centurions had proven the largest drain of their resources by far. The giant automata were vicious and heavily armoured, with attacks that could easily injure both him and Porkchop. But in all honesty, at this point the only significant advantage the automata had was manpower.

Now that they had discovered where the Centurions’ cores were, they weren’t so bad to take down. Sure, they took their licks doing so, but they had strength and firepower on their side. Plus, every battle became easier than the last. Much like the worker drones, the Centurions’ fighting style was rote. The automata were flexible and reacted dynamically, but they always used the most technically appropriate movement with no thought to guile or subtlety. It made them viciously susceptible to feints.

That weakness proved their undoing as he and his team punched deeper and deeper into the facility, even with Centurions becoming a larger part of the forces in the deeper layers of the Imperial ruin. Such a change had barely slowed them.

They were so close to the so-called mainframe he could almost taste it — literally. Starting four floors ago, the mana in the air had grown denser and more dominated by arcane affinity. It was like an electric crackle on the skin, and a metallic tang hung on his tongue.

Here, at the lowest level of the ruin, they didn’t even need to search for directions to the central core. They could simply follow the sharply rising mana gradient.

It wouldn’t be long now. Their expedition was almost at its end. Their fights had brought them skill levels and power in spades. While Rapid Adaption and Brotherhood of Ichor and Animus stubbornly hung at their thresholds, the rest of his skills had seen pleasing growth, as had his class levels. Even with the skyrocketing experience requirements, fighting so many silver automata above their level had its benefits. He was close — only a few levels away from evolving his next class skill.

Kaius longed to review his status and see the changes before him, but he had more important things to focus on. His inscriptions.

Reviewing his progress could wait until the core of this place was destroyed.

Tying off the final knot of the Stormlash inscription he was working on, Kaius jolted as he felt someone shake his knee. Ianmus was crouched down in front of him— an impressive feat, considering they had crammed themselves into a utility closet at the back of some sort of meeting room.

The mage must have been watching the flow of his mana and had waited until he finished an inscription to get his attention.

“A patrol just passed a few minutes ago. It’s our best bet to get through the final stretch without running into more.”

Their moment had come, and Kaius felt anticipation clench in his belly.

It heightened the visceral excitement prickling across his skin. The core of this facility would be heavily defended — he knew it deep in his gut. Regardless of how oddly aimless the automata were acting, he just couldn’t see anything else being the case.

Such a thing was bound to be a good fight.

He sprang into action, smoothly drawing his blade as he got to his feet.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“Let’s go. I hope the ruin has something more in store for us. The Centurions are starting to get a little samey,” Porkchop said, hungry aggression bleeding through his words as they spilled out of the closet — their impromptu rest spot.

Kenva chuckled. “Of that I have no doubt. A place as important as this core would definitely be the most fortified. The only question is if whatever degradation has affected the automata has damaged its defences as well.”

Kaius only nodded as they ran out of the room and down the hall. As soon as they were in the main thoroughfare, mana billowed around them with palpable pressure. It wasn’t quite blinding — not with his Truesight — but the sheer intensity of it almost ruined his ability to make out fine details in the mana currents, and made his mortal vision seem washed out and pallid in comparison.

Every sense Kaius had was focused, ready for an army of Centurions to spill around the corner at any moment.

Every experience he’d ever had told him that things never went simply for them. Not in their lives.

There was always another beast, more terrible and horrific than the last — a practically universal law that all Delvers lived by. If you didn’t expect it, you died when something caught you flat-footed.

It meant their lack of opposition set Kaius’s heart pounding as they tore through the halls with raw arcane streaming over them in an almost physical wave. It was like he had run a marathon without any stats — a pounding of his heart that wouldn’t quiet.

Where were the guards? The patrols? There should have been something — a far-off clank, or a telltale wheeze of fluid-filled cylinders as a Centurion stepped into their hall.

Yet the passageway was silent, other than their heavy breathing, the hum of the lights above, and the far-off sounds of Imperial artifice in other parts of the ruin.

It might have been simple paranoia. He knew, logically, that for every time things had taken a turn for the worse, there had been several dozen others where everything went fine. Yet he would not be the one who let complacency take hold.