24: Into the depths

[Year 21 Month 2: 1 Month has passed]

[Blessed: 5528 – 21 + 32]

[You have leveled up]

[You have gained 1 level]

[You are level 52]

It had been just over three months when Salfi returned. She was followed by a large pack of Vexus. Normally, this wouldn’t be a major concern as even the evolved hounds were much weaker than her, but her exhaustion was evident from her occasional stumbling.

Connecting with the closest patrol of golems that I had, I immediately sent them to intercept her path. Not leaving anything to chance, I forcefully flooded the constructs with more mana than normal, which massively increased their speed at the cost of higher wear and tear. Even a few minutes of overclocking would lead to an increased chance of catastrophic failure, but alas.

While it was cutting it close, the alloy soldiers managed to reach her just in time, with the Vexus practically biting at her heels. Carefully but swiftly, one of the golems grabbed her and held the elven woman in a princess carry. The others would delay and kill as many of the hounds as possible, allowing the more precious cargo to make it into the safety of my real perimeter. I only kept a small number of squads patrolling far out.

With the immediate threat dealt with and Salfi headed directly towards safety, I focused on her appearance.

The young elvish woman had no major wounds, the adventuring gear she had left with was battered almost beyond recognition, and only a few remaining scraps of cloth and metal kept her decency intact. Her blonde hair had been stained a muddy brown by the long dried blood that had seeped through it.

All in all, she was relatively unharmed, but definitely would need to take a very long bath.

I should also get some clothes delivered to the infirmary in the meantime.

By the time that the golem had made it back to the walls of Runehold, its components had begun to dissolve and literally fly off. At this point, it was only the mana running through it that kept it from falling apart.

Thankfully, there was just enough time for the golem to gently transfer Salfi into the waiting arms of a human guard. Osbert had already known she was on the way.

I sighed a bit as the golem seized up in place, finally having deteriorated enough to no longer count as its previous self. If I were to use [Animate] on it, it would just be a slightly wobbly pile of scrap with no purpose.

Anyways, that was beside the point, it was obvious to my senses that Salfi had achieved what she wanted, sometime during the last few months, she had broken through a threshold, and her mana grew denser and more potent.

While I would prefer to wait around for her to awake and ask her about her new class, the golems that were excavating near the dungeon had hit an open pocket below the dungeon just before I noticed the elf’s return.

The golem that had found it had gone straight through a seemingly strong floor and plunged down into a dark pit that went straight down for some time. Strangely, the pit looked to have been excavated by hand in a perfect vertical corridor, and unlike the strong yet minable walls of the dungeon, these couldn’t be extracted by our golems or mana-powered tools that had been developed.

It actually reminds me a lot of an elevator shaft, but much longer and wider.

The abruptness of the collapse had meant that neither the runic assistants nor I had noticed the golem before it was destroyed by whatever was at the bottom. But that didn’t really stop us.

So far, we had run various tests on the open pit, including mana density and the ‘flavor’ of the mana, and it had been rather inconclusive. We had dropped a small golem probe that Codex was piloting into the pit, and it was destroyed almost the second it hit solid ground.

Despite the abruptness, we were able to tell it wasn’t killed by an organic substance. Just before we lost connection, there was a brief surge in mana and a bright flash as the connection between us and the golem was severed.

Whatever was down there was dangerous, but my curiosity was stronger than the slight annoyance my drones being destroyed left me with. After all, I could just make them out of the stone around us.

Instead of sacrificing my relatively more expensive golems made of more rare resources, such as the alloyed soldiers or juggernaughts, I just started to animate barely functional masses of debris. They wouldn’t be able to walk, but could let me see a bit further.

It was only after throwing down several tons worth of animated stone and shrapnel that continued to be blasted by either a light-based weapon or a kinetic weapon that I realized I was being an idiot.

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I am so stupid. I felt like slapping myself, despite my inability to do so, I have sand golems. They are heavily resistant to kinetic projectiles, and if I use a good sand with a very high silica content, maybe it could refract or reflect the beams of energy.

So, without further ado, I had Codex move some of the ground silica that was on track to be made into glass into one of the experimental golem molds instead, only taking a few minutes to produce ten small golems that were roughly a foot tall with six legs, basically a few small spiders.

While I knew that the spider version had a different designation compared to the humanoid golems, I was surprised to see another word added to the previous description.

[You have created (10) Silica Arachnid Golem (Advanced level 15)]